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4 


FAITH IN CHRIST 


BY 
JOHN J. MOMENT 


CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS 
NEW YORK 9 9$ 9% 9 1917 


Copryricut, 1917, BY, 
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS 


Published April, 1917. 


TO THE OFFICERS AND MEMBERS OF THE HIGH 
STREET PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, NEWARK, 
NEW JERSEY, IN SINCERE APPRECIATION OF 
THEIR UNFAILING FRATERNITY, THEIR GEN- 
EROSITY, THEIR LOYALTY TO CHRIST AND HIS 
CHURCH, AND THEIR COURAGE IN SERVICE 


PREFACE 


WE have travelled a long road intellec- 
tually during these three or four centuries 
since the various groups of Reformers, 
each in its own fashion, revised the creeds 
of Augustine and the early councils. 

We have invented new instruments for 
our science, more revolutionary in their 
way than the steam-engine and the motor- 
car. We have developed new processes 
of thought, more revolutionary still. We 
have shifted our point of view from its 
previous proud position at the centre of 
the universe to a very modest location 
on a satellite of one of an innumerable 
conglomeration of suns. Altogether we 
have achieved for ourselves a new world 
more radically than if we had packed our 
baggage and migrated to Mars. One need 
not be surprised, therefore, if the ancient 
theologies seem to the ordinary man of 
to-day, not merely unsatisfactory, which 
would be bad enough, but uninteresting, 
which is hopelessly worse. 


vil 


vill PREFACE 


Yet wisdom will not die with us, and 
neither was it born with Galileo, or with 
Bacon, or Charles Darwin. Ogniben con- 
cealed no meagre depth of thought beneath 
the frivolity of expression when he said: 
‘‘A philosopher’s life is spent in discover- 
ing that, of the half-dozen truths he knew 
when a child, such an one is a lie, as the 
world states it in set terms; and then, 
after a weary lapse of years, and plenty of 
hard thinking, it becomes a truth again 
after all, as he happens to newly consider 
it and view it in a different relation with the 
others: and so he re-states it, to the con- 
fusion of somebody else in due time.” 
Our new truth, when it has at last come to 
maturity, ordinarily turns out to be but 
the amplification of a truth so old as al- 
most to have been forgotten. 

This book attempts a brief definition 
and defense of faith in Christ which shall 
be frankly modern both in its presupposi- 
tions and in its modes of thought; but I 
shall be much, disappointed if we do not 
get far enough in our thinking to become 
aware, at every point, of our spiritual 
kinship with the past. 

I am under peculiar obligations to Presi- 


PREFACE 1X 


dent William Douglas. Mackenzie, of Hart- 
ford Theological Seminary, for his goodness 
in going over the manuscript and giving 
me the benefit of invaluable suggestions; 
which is only a‘small part of my debt to 
him. He must not, however, be assumed 
to stand sponsor for any of my theological 
positions. 


J. J. M. 


Vill. 


VIII. 


CONTENTS 
I. THE DEMOCRACY OF TRUTH 


Tor Prrest- In CLWEFDS (4. «wes 1 


Tue Voice WITHIN AS THE VOICE OF Gop 18 


Tur INSPIRATION OF THE BIBLE... .- . Q7 
Mopern BIsnioMANCY ....--+-:-> 32 
Tur CREDIBILITY OF SCRIPTURE... . . 36 
Our INDEPENDENCE OF SCRIPTURE. ... 44 
Tue NrEEep oF AUTHORITY .....-.-- 53 


Tue AUTHORITY OF THE BIBLE .... .- 66 


Il. THE SON OF MAN 


Ture SEARCH FOR TRUTH .....--- 71 
Ture Heart oF THE CREED .......- 78 
Corn any CONDUCT ai he ee ety = 84 
Lirr’s CoMPLEXITIBS .......+-+=+- 93 
FartH AND CONVERSION ....-+- =: 98 
Tue Travail OF REBIRTH .....- -: 104 
Wart 41 APAER Chile Diciesc ells et Meueen os 111 


Tur Light or THE WoRLD ...... - 120 
xi 


Xli 


CONTENTS 


Ill. THE SON OF GOD 


Tue Eccentricities or Doust .... . 128 
THe Mapness or ATHEISM ....... 135 
Tue CuaracteR of Gop ........ 143 
SIGNS Aine aa Mew key hus Ver renee Citar 151 
POPULAR ALHEOLOGY iyi: aig) re mean 154 
THE Imace or THE INVISIBLE. .... . 159 
IV. THE HOLY SPIRIT 
Gop INURE: Sot (000) cue wea 165 
Tue Unity or rue Sprrir ....... 180 
Gop iin Socrmry ats): .) cus a Pa 184 
Tue Kinepom or Gop ......... 191 
V. THE CROSS 
THE PRoBLEM oF PRoviDENCE .... . 208 
His Own InrerprereR ..... . . Be Ea 5 
Tue REVELATION OF THE Cross... . . 229 
Licht FROM THE WILDERNESS. .... . 228 
THE First CoMMANDMENT ....... 237 
Tae: Loven or Gonlytis i vee Urns | 246 
ABP 3009.12 a VA CR Parte Pek AN 253 


FAITH IN CHRIST 


I 
THE DEMOCRACY OF TRUTH 


I 
THE PRIEST IN TWEEDS 


At the very outset of all religious inquiry 
the question presents itself of where we are 
to find our spiritual authority. As in our 
investigation of the facts of history and 
science we have our obvious sources and 
our fairly well-established rules of evidence, 
so when we come to discuss questions of 
right and wrong, of God and immortality, 
those deeper facts of the world of the un- 
seen which has its centre in the soul of 
every man and which reaches out beyond 
the stars and across the grave, there also 
we must have some substantial basis on 
which our knowledge may rest. 

Time was when men in search of spir- 
itual truth turned with implicit trust to 
the priest; for the priest was properly 
the bearer of God’s messages to men no 


less than of men’s gifts and prayers to 
1 


2 FAITH IN CHRIST 


God. He was supposed to be in posses- 
sion of the hidden sources of knowledge. 
For common folk a veil hung before the 
mysteries, but for him the veil parted; 
while others listened and looked in vain, 
he heard the Voice beneath the thunder 
and saw the Face behind the sun. 

It was very easy in that day for men to 
think of a particular group of their fel- 
lows as invested with special powers and 
attributes. The king’s robes, the peasant’s 
smock-frock, the national costume of a 
people, no less than the priest’s vestments, 
were symbolic of qualities in which the 
very souls of men were supposed to be 
clothed. 

To-day, however, the priest lays aside 
his vestments to play tennis; an endow- 
ment so easily relinquished cannot be 
taken too seriously. King, farmer, soldier, 
postman, and butler alike discard their 
liveries when they turn from_ business 
to pleasure; the regimentals have be- 
come the mere badge and convenience of 
a trade. 

No man but may don the most rigorous 
uniform of the gentleman after six P. M., 
and none, in America and England at 


THE PRIEST IN TWEEDS 3 


least, may assume such dignity before 
this hour; during the daytime we are all 
supposed to be workmen and—with cer- 
tain concessions to elegance—must dress 
as such. 

A New York débutante flutters about 
the ballroom in a Paris gown, a Chinese 
mandarin strolls out of an afternoon be- 
neath a top-hat made in London, and, 
behold! we are aware that Paul’s astound- 
ing dictum is no longer astounding but a 
commonplace; the world confesses that 
“he hath made of one every nation of 
men.” 

The common nature of humanity is an 
axiom of our thought. And as we know 
that sovereign and _ subject, swordsman 
and penman, Aryan and Asian, for all 
their differences, are yet of one clay, so 
we know the priest to be a man like other 
men, with no secret passage into the sanc- 
tuary. His oracles have to pass muster 
under the scrutiny of our common sense 
or find themselves ignominiously  dis- 
missed. The most modest member of 
my congregation feels himself quite ca- 
pable of passing judgment on the morning 
sermon, and he would do so still, I am 


4 FAITH IN CHRIST 


confident, though I should replace my 
Geneva gown by a surplice and wear my 
collar reversed. For men of modern mind, 
the anointed priesthood, with its magic 
rites and peculiar privileges, is a super- 
stition. | 

Within recent generations the Bible has 
come to occupy the position of the ancient 
priesthood. To it, we have been told, 
and not to any man, however anointed 
and prayed over, we must turn for light 
on the mysteries of the unseen. But to 
seek a solution of the problem of revela- 
tion by this means is much like trying to 
solve a puzzle by throwing it into your 
neighbor’s yard. Along our familiar streets 
no fairies lurk, a man might say, but who 
knows what gossamer wings rustle among 
the forests of Arcady? In the twentieth 
century, we are agreed, no select group of 
diviners enjoys the privilege of the open 
vision, but we still cling to the idea that 
centuries ago conditions may have been 
very different; that the prophets of Scrip- 
ture may have been the divinely anointed 
company to whom, in very truth, the 
Glory was revealed and the secret mes- 
sages whispered. 


THE PRIEST IN TWEEDS 3 


Clearly enough the writers of Scripture 
did assume to be in possession of a revela- 
tion, but we shall do well to ask how far 
they assumed this as a privilege peculiar 
to themselves. Peter himself, archetype of 
our most exalted modern pontifex, ex- 
plicitly preached that the entire Christian 
community constituted a “royal priest- 
hood,”* and though we have commonly as- 
sumed that to make the priesthood uni- 
versal amounted to about the same thing as 
abolishing the institution altogether, Peter 
evidently did not intend to abolish it; 
he supposed, in his simplicity, that he 
was merely extending it. Throughout the 
New Testament the quaint, old-fashioned 
doctrine is, that every man may be 
admitted to the high, priestly privilege; 
that, as the Reformers insisted, there is 
an “immediate relation existing between 
every human soul and the Fountain of 
Truth.”? John sets forth the doctrine in 
its most extravagant form: “Ye have an 
anointing from the Holy One, and ye 
know all things.’’® 


'T Peter 2: 5, 9. 
*D’Aubigné, History of the Reformation, vol. I, p. 68. 
31 John 2 : 20. 


6 FAITH IN CHRIST 


Certain sects have taken the doctrine 
quite literally, and have felt so sure of 
their direct, supernatural revelation that 
they have dispensed with the Bible en- 
tirely. But to most of us this mysticism 
has a flavor no less antique and exotic 
than that of the anointed priesthood it- 
self. We may have dispensed largely with 
the Bible, but we have done so rather 
because we have lost faith in all revela- 
tions than because we have found a more 
satisfactory medium elsewhere. Certainly 
no messages have flashed for us amid the 
play of the lightnings, no demonic voices 
call to us in the solitude, and no angel 
visitants come to lend a meaning to our 
dreams. 

Nevertheless, upon us the priest’s blood- 
spattered mantle has indeed fallen. That 
we fail to recognize it on our own shoulders 
comes of the change of fashions it has suf- 
fered with the years. For its typical mod- 
ern cut carries no suggestion of altars and 
liturgies; it is not even that of the gown or 
cassock or high-buttoned waistcoat—mere 
toys these for our clerical doll play—but 
that of those more mysteriously symbolic 
garments in which John Bright stood be- 


THE PRIEST IN TWEEDS “i 


fore the queen, the working clothes of a 
democracy. 

The veil of the temple is rent in twain, 
and we enter, you and I, common men, 
into the Holy of Holies. We may ap- 
proach reverently, like the priest of old, 
for an hour of prayer; more often we 
drop in casually, to speak our mind on 
some current political question, or to pass 
judgment on our next-door neighbor, not 
at all suspecting the awful Presence into 
which we have come. 

For no man expresses an opinion as to 
what heaven must be, or as to what earth 
ought to be; as to what is right or wrong 
in conduct, or what is true or false in 
principle; no man passes a moral judg- 
ment, or dares in his own right to criticise 
the ethics of a political or commercial 
policy, but he is high-handedly usurp- 
ing the ancient, sacred prerogatives of the 
priesthood. And there is none of us so 
humble-minded but that he is assuming 
these prerogatives every day of his life. It 
is not even optional with us; we know that 
we must play the priest for ourselves 
whether we will or not, that we are indi- 
vidually responsible for our own convic- 


8 FAITH IN CHRIST 


tions. The ultimate appeal has definitely 
passed, from all external authority whatso- 
ever, to the mind and conscience of the 
individual concerned. 

The revolution which has been thus 
effected, however, has been by no means 
so fundamental as_ surface indications 
would lead us to suppose. Even in the 
old days the people had much more au- 
thority, and the priest much less, than the 
forms implied. Men took the priest’s 
word for it that he had been in direct 
communion with the Unseen and were 
willing in consequence to base their be- 
liefs on the sure ground of his knowledge. 
But there was a limit to their credence; 
they insisted that he should tell them 
nothing except that which they already 
believed. You never caught the priest 
coming out of the sanctuary with a bit of 
news. From age to age, with religious’ 
fidelity, he mumbled the same formularies, 
and from age to age he emerged from the 
mystic Presence to preach the same truths. 
Or, if there was any advance in his teach- 
ings, it was carefully disguised as the 
mere, gradual, inevitable unfolding of the 
old principles. Let him dare to astonish 


THE PRIEST IN TWEEDS 9 


the world with a brand-new revelation, 
and he would see how his temerity would 
fare. Men would not, of course, have done 
anything so revolutionary as to deny the 
validity of priestly authority; they would 
merely have torn the robes from him as a 
manifest impostor. 

In ancient Israel so utterly did the 
priesthood fail as the medium of revela- 
tion that the teaching function passed 
from its keeping altogether and developed 
an order of its own, the order of prophets. 
And the authority of the prophets, even 
more patently than that of the priests, 
was rooted in the moral and _ spiritual 
sense of the audience addressed. The 
people themselves would doubtless have 
said that they accepted the prophet’s 
teachings for the mere reason that he 
was a prophet and so had received his 
messages from God. But how did they 
know he was a prophet? The Deutero- 
nomic rule,’ that the true prophet should 
be distinguished from the false by the 
fulfilment of his predictions, could ob- 
viously have been of little practical service. 
Indeed, another rule? specifically provided 

1 Deuteronomy 18: 20 ff. . * Deuteronomy 13 : 1 ff. 


10 FAITH IN CHRIST 


that the false prophet should be put to 
death even though his predictions were 
fulfilled. The truth is that that prophet 
was recognized as true whose words car- 
ried conviction in the minds of his hearers, 
so that, ultimately, the message was not 
accepted on the authority of the prophet; 
on the contrary, the prophet was accepted 
on account of the compelling truth of his 
message. 

And through all the years of Christian 
history have not devout men consistently 
testified that their faith in the truths of 
the gospel was based on their living knowl- 
edge of God, their consciousness of recon- 
ciliation and their experience of fellow- 
ship with him? 

Cardinal Newman accepted implicitly 
the doctrine of papal infallibility, but, 
more thoughtful than most worshippers 
at the shrine of external authority, he was 
aware that his acceptance of the papal man- 
dates must finally rest, not on his belief in 
papal infallibility, but on his own spir- 
itual insight into the truths which those 
mandates presented. ‘Nothing can be 
imposed on me,” he says, “different in 
kind from what I already hold—much 


THE PRIEST IN TWEEDS 1 


less contrary to it. The new truth which 
is promulgated, if it is to be called new, 
must be at least homogeneous, cognate, 
implicit, viewed relatively to the old truth. 
It must be what I may even have guessed, 
or wished, to be included in the apostolic 
revelation; and at least it will be of such 
a character that my thoughts readily 
concur in it, or coalesce with it, as soon 
as I hear it.’”} 

Designing priests have undoubtedly de- 
ceived their people many times, foisting 
on them opinions and beliefs which had 
little or no relation to the moral judgment 
of the people themselves. The example 
of Joseph Smith is evidence enough that 
to this day the ruse of a special revelation 
may work, even when it works havoc; 
and yet the Mormon prophet did not de- 
lude his followers into any beliefs which, 
for reasons of their own, they were not 
abundantly ready to accept. 

The priest’s power of deception is 
severely circumscribed, according as_ his 
power of persuasion is circumscribed. The 
idea that a people, except, perhaps, in the 
last stages of degenerate ignorance, may 

1 Apologia pro Vita Sua, Everyman’s Library Edition, p. 227. 


12 FAITH IN CHRIST 


be so priest-ridden as to believe anything 
the priest ‘tells them, is nonsense. They 
will believe what the priest tells them 
just so long as he is properly guarded in 
his utterances. Newman insists that the 
Pope himself has been scrupulously care- 
ful not to issue his infallible decrees until 
the Church at large has leisurely, in the 
course of centuries, made up its mind as 
to what it believes and that then he has 
been content to register the popular decision. 

According to Newman, that is, the Pope 
has never attempted to play spiritual 
leader to his people; and therein he has 
shown himself wise, in the way of the 
world; for the prophet, priest of a new 
message, has of necessity a hard battle 
to fight. He can never transplant a con- 
viction, any more than a humorist can 
transplant his enjoyment of a joke. At 
best he can but point his pupils to the 
truth which he has seen, in the hope that 
they, too, will see it for themselves. He 
will do well to arrest their attention by 
all the arts at his command, but, what- 
ever his powers, he must make up his 
mind to wait upon the slow vision of the 
crowd. 


THE PRIEST IN TWEEDS 13 


Proverbially, the prophet is without 
honor in his own country, before his first 
audience. For his crown he must expect 
a dunce’s cap, and when the mocking 
ceases it is likely to be succeeded, not by 
honor, but by reviling. First we despise 
him, and then kill him, and then—garnish 
his tomb! How through the centuries, 
he has donned his mantle of flame as if 
it had been a royal robe! In death he has 
seen, not the final doom of failure, but the 
first gleaming promise of success. He 
had known something immeasurably more 
bitter than death, more cruel than the 
tongue of fire, the lion’s claw; he had 
known hearts that were fat, eyes that 
were blind, ears that were deaf. Men do 
not kill another for talking Greek; that 
they cared enough to kill him meant, he 
knew, that they had begun to under- 
stand. 

For every man the perception of spir- 
itual truth must always be in a sense 
priestly, immediate. It must flash out of 
the soul itself, or remain hidden. 

For example, I may hold this man to 
be of loftier soul than another because 
he is more generous-minded toward his 


14 FAITH IN CHRIST 


enemies. If you take issue with me, I 
may bring such evidence as I please in 
support of his magnanimity; but if you 
insist that a generous-minded attitude 
toward one’s enemies is of itself not a 
virtue but a weakness, how then shall I 
set about to bring you to my way of think- 
ing? The ordinary arguments at once 
appear predestined to futility, and the 
testimony of other men will not much 
avail. For yourself must you recognize 
the force and beauty of the truth which 
I preach, appreciate the inherent merit 
of magnanimity in some such fashion as 
the artistically trained soul appreciates a 
masterpiece of painting, or the scales re- 
main over your eyes. 

“Whilst the doors of this temple stand 
open, night and day,” said Emerson, ‘‘and 
the oracles of this truth cease never, it 
is guarded by one stern condition; this, 
namely; it is an intuition. It can never 
be received at second hand. Truly speak- 
ing, it is not instruction but provocation, 
which I can receive from another soul. 
What he announces, I must find true in 
me, or reject; and on his word, or as his 
second, be he who he may, I can accept 


THE PRIEST IN TWEEDS 15 


994 


nothing. And the principle is precisely 
that set forth nearly two thousand years 
ago by certain other preachers in relation 
to the truths which they were proclaiming: 
“The things of the Spirit .. . are spiri- 
tually judged.”? “He that believeth on 
the Son of God hath the witness in him- 
self.’ “Why even of yourselves,” Christ 
asked, “‘judge ye not what is right ?’’ 

So far is revelation from within and 
not from without that, more often than 
not, it does not come even in the teacher’s 
presence. Suddenly I become aware of 
a truth which hitherto had escaped me; 
for an instant I stand alone on the proud 
eminence of my discovery; and then, a 
passage from Carlyle or Browning comes 
flashing to my mind, a verse from Paul, 
a paragraph from Augustine, a half-for- 
gotten word from my father’s counsel in 
boyhood, mayhap even a sentence from 
last Sunday’s sermon; no long time is it 
till my solitary eminence is peopled with 
poets, prophets, seers, the wise of all time. 
This discovery of mine, I realize, is none 


1 An address delivered before the senior class in Divinity Col- 
lege, Cambridge, Sunday evening, July 15, 1838. 
2J Corinthians 2: 14. 3. John 5:10. 4 Luke 12: 57. 


16 FAITH IN CHRIST 


other than that which they have been 
trying to teach me from the beginning, but 
which I have been too dull to understand, 
and my triumph is chastened by humilia- 
tion. 

I remember once, when a boy, reading a 
book of verses in celebration of that brown 
season which intervenes between the flam- 
ing colors of autumn and the white of 
winter’s snows. I read the verses prob- 
ably because of some fascination in their 
language and rhythm, for I certainly had 
no sense of the beauties they were depict- 
ing. The glory of budding spring was 
open to me, of summer fields, of autumn 
woods, of snow-covered landscape; but 
the glory of brown earth strewn with 
wilted leaves and surmounted by barren 
trees was entirely meaningless and unreal. 
I had been aware of no such glory, and 
after reading the verses I was aware of 
none still. But one day, how long after- 
ward I have quite forgotten, I walked out 
through the felds in this unpretentious 
season, looking, not for beauty, but for 
rabbits, when of a sudden my attention 
was caught by the mellow tones of ploughed 
ground, the faded gold of shrubbery along 


THE PRIEST IN TWEEDS uty 


the fences, the tangled grace of leafless 
branches, and, through the lacework of 
the trees, the metallic gleam of | light- 
filled skies. I remembered the verses and 
knew that the poet had told the truth. 

Unaided by a quicker eye than my 
own, I should probably never have seen. 
This is the inspiration of the artist, that 
he sees first; the rest of us walk through 
the world unheeding till he opens our 
eyes with his magic. And this, likewise, 
is the inspiration of the real and great 
prophet, that he finds himself on his em- 
inence of discovery indeed alone; he is 
pioneer. For all successors the ascent is 
easier, but in each the experience of the 
pioneer must be in part reproduced; each 
must know something of the initial sense 
of loneliness, the surprise and joy of per- 
sonal discovery. 


Il 


THE VOICE WITHIN AS THE VOICE 
OF GOD 


I wAVE spoken of the revelation, the in- 
tuition, the inner witness—call it what 
you will—as coming “from within.” But 
this, after all, is a very indefinite account 
of the matter. Yesterday we knew not; 
to-day, suddenly, mysteriously, we know. 
From somewhere it has arrived, this that 
aforetime was not and now is. From men 
we are aware we have it not; in ourselves 
we found it and not in another. By what 
means we know not, but somehow, out of 
the vast truth-reservoir of the universe it 
has come to make of us its habitation. 
They of old said—the same thing, more 
simply—that it came from God. 

It may be objected that we are taking 
a mere figure of speech too seriously in 
assuming that such knowledge comes from 
anywhere. When we see an apple lying 
in the roadway, or a star twinkling in the 
sky, it is proper enough to ask how it 

18 


THE VOICE WITHIN 19 


happened to get there. But our percep- 
tion of the apple and our appreciation of 
the beauty of the star, these are not things 
at all in any real sense; they are merely 
activities of the mind, with no actual 
existence of their own, and to think of 
them as arriving from somewhere else 
is utterly naive and unscientific. 

Well, if we may not speak of them as 
having a source, at least we may speak 
of them as having a cause. And what is 
it that causes this sudden quickening of 
the mind by which we are awakened to 
new perceptions and appreciations? We 
shall agree, I think, that the same creative 
energies which originally produced the 
human mind must be the author as well 
of every succeeding enrichment of mental 
power. No idea could be more absurdly 
naive and unscientific than to suppose 
that creation ceased ten thousand or fifty 
million years ago. If, then, for the pur- 
poses of discussion, we consent to- call 
these creative energies by the primitive 
name of God, we shall still look to him 
as the great and sole Revealer of truth. 

“What sign showest thou?” challenged 
the Pharisees, and such is still the chal- 


20 FAITH IN CHRIST 


lenge of the critics of the Christian faith. 
‘No man cometh unto me,” Christ an- 
swered, “‘except the Father which sent 
me draw him.”! Always it needs the 
creative energizing of the mind itself, this 
inner voice of a divine persuasion; and if 
a man finds no such attestation in his 
own soul, then are argument, authority, 
and miracle all futile alike. 

Which, however, is by no means to say 
that the responsibility for our beliefs and 
unbeliefs rests entirely with God; not so 
easily may we slip out from under the 
burden of our accountability. There are 
many who attempt it, rigorous Calvinists 
without the saving inconsistencies of Cal- 
vinist piety, who give you their opinion 
with an air as much as to say that the im- 
portant thing is not that the opinion is 
true, but merely that it is theirs. With 
the steadfastness of a cow on the railroad- 
track they stand their ground in the face 
of fact and reason, obviously convinced 
that their faith has seized them from on 
high without so much as a by-your-leave 
to their intelligence. In the course of 
time they are liable to a rude awakening. 

1 John 6 : 44. 


THE VOICE WITHIN 21 


In the hands of the logicians, it must be 
granted, the doctrine of God’s part in the 
process of enlightenment, known to in- 
famy under the name of the Doctrine of 
Predestination, became a libel on the divine 
character which any impartial judge would 
recognize as actionable at law. But it.is 
to be remembered that in the days of its 
simplicity the doctrine was not the product 
of logic, it was the product of experience. 
Men were aware that they had become 
the instruments of energies which tran- 
scended them, the recipients of messages, 
to recur to the older figure, which had their 
source not in themselves but in the in- 
finite. They saw multitudes of other men 
who listened to the same preaching, who 
read the same manuscripts, of parchment 
or of life, and yet remained unenlightened. 
The truths which to them were obvious 
and compelling were to others foolishness. 
Yet they were not conscious of being 
wiser or better than other men; surely 
they had been chosen, and chosen through 
no merit of their own. Their vain-seeming 
confidence that they were the particular 
favorites of the Almighty was rooted, not 
in vanity, but in modesty. 


22 FAITH IN CHRIST 


And why was it, in fact, that the great 
choice had fallen on them? We, certainly, 
cannot tolerate the thought that God’s 
act was in any sense arbitrary. “Every 
one who hath listened to the Father,” said 
Christ, “cometh unto me.”! “Except 
ye turn and become as little children.’’? 
God’s elect, like the choice spirits of studio 
or lecture-room, are not the most gifted 
but the most teachable, those who listen, 
those who are willing to learn. It needs 
only that the grace of curiosity be not 
smothered by conceit; it needs just that 
modesty of which we have already con- 
victed the disciples. 

Modern science prepared the way for 
the foundation of its substantial structure 
by the daringly destructive process of a 
wholesale and merciless doubt. Let us 
begin, said Descartes, with the assump- 
tion that we know nothing. And science 
has maintained its vitality for the very 
reason that it has held its conclusions per- 
ennially subject to revision. The very mo- 
ment it loses its humility it will lose its life. 


1John 6: 45; ‘vide translations by Weymouth, Moffatt, and 
Fenton. 
2 Matthew 18: 3. 


THE VOICE WITHIN 23 


The doubt of the scientist, however, is 
quite different from that of the professed 
sceptic, whose scepticism stops short at 
the very point where it might begin to 
bear fruit for him. Though he insist on 
doubting all else in the face of evidence, 
he accepts without evidence the appall- 
ing proposition that we cannot know any- 
thing. His real affiliations are not with 
the scientist, but with the dogmatist; like 
him, he has found finality. The dogmatist 
rests because he knows all that is good for 
him to know; the sceptic rests because 
there is nothing that he can know. The 
sincere seeker after truth recognizes that 
“now we see through a glass darkly,” and 
because of this he presses toward the day 
when we shall see “‘face to face.” 

Sceptic and dogmatist are blood- 
brothers. The man who has learned the 
articles of his faith from a priest or doc- 
ument trembles before every fresh dis- 
closure of science. He clings to every 
comma of his creed, not because he is 
utterly confident of everything in it, but 
because he is at heart utterly sceptical 
of everything in it. He is forever afraid 
that the whole fabric will be proved false. 


Q4 FAITH IN CHRIST 


The man whose knowledge springs from 
within welcomes your discoveries. He is 
assured that, though you may correct 
his vision, you cannot make him unsee 
the truth which with his own eyes he has 
seen. He holds his knowledge lightly, 
subject always to expansion and revision, 
but the lightness is rooted in confidence; 
his is the only knowledge that is sublimely 
sure of itself. 

“That which I have spoken I have 
received from God”; this testimony of 
~Savonarola before his judges is, and ever- 
more must be, the testimony of every real 
preacher, in the cathedral or at the cross- 
roads. Or of what use are sermons? Why, 
otherwise, is plagiarism in the pulpit a 
crime? Drill your preachers else in the 
arts of rhetoric and send them out to re- 
cite the great, historic homilies of the 
Church. We desire many things in our 
sermons, this one thing we demand—that 
they shall be the preacher’s own and not 
another’s. Were we less fastidious in this 
matter, we might listen to better sermons, 
but we tolerate all mediocrities and stupid- 
ities rather than be imposed on by parrot 
speaking. However little the preacher 


THE VOICE WITHIN 25 


may know, out of such knowledge as he 
has he must speak, or hold his peace. 
Such is the tribute which every congrega- 
tion pays to first-hand information. 


* Yourself must feel it first, your end to capture. 
Unless from out the soul it well, 
And with a fresh, resistless rapture 
Your hearers’ very hearts compel,— 
You only sit and gum together, 
Hash up the orts from others’ feast, 
Blow puny flames with lungs of leather, 
From ashes whence the life has ceased; 
Children and apes will gape in admiration, 
If for such praise your palates thirst; 
But heart to heart ye will not sway and fashion, 
Save in your own heart ye feel it first.” ! 


Men have raked heaven and earth for 
an oracle, and always at last, like romance 
and poetry and every other noble thing, 
they have found it by their own hearth 
fire, or it has remained undiscovered. ‘‘For 
this commandment which I command thee 
this day, it is not too hard for thee, neither 
is it far off. It is not in heaven that thou 
shouldest say, Who will go up for us to 
heaven, and bring it unto us, and make us 
to hear it, that we may do it? Neither is 

1 Faust, part I, Translation by Albert G. Latham. 


26 FAITH IN CHRIST 


it beyond the sea, that thou shouldest 
say, Who will go over the sea for us, and 
bring it unto us, and make us to hear it, 
that we may do it? But the word is very 
nigh unto thee, in thy mouth and in thy 
heart, that thou mayest do it.”! So 
long ago the seer told us! And so slow we 
have been to learn, so loath to believe! 


“God is not dumb, that he should speak no more; 
If thou hast wanderings in the wilderness 

And find’st not Sinai, ’tis thy soul is poor; 

There towers the mountain of the Voice no less, 
Which whoso seeks shall find.’’2 


1 Deuteronomy 30 : 11 ff. 
* Lowell, Bibliolatres. 


— 


a a 


Tit 
THE INSPIRATION OF THE BIBLE 


Timp souls still warn us that the Bible 
is in danger from the findings of the critics. 
As well might they warn us that the sun 
is in danger from the prying of the as- 
tronomers. A devout elder whom I knew 
once deprecated the study of the history 
of the canon in a men’s Bible class for the 
reason, as he put it, that “you are apt 
to run up against queer things.” I doubt 
if any man can sleep comfortably with 
the suspicion that there are “‘queer things” 
at the foundation of his faith, and happily 
the fears are quite superfluous. 

Much of the discussion of Biblical in- 
spiration has been wholly beside the point. 
The question is not as to how far the 
prophets spoke of their own volition, and 
how far they were under the spell of a 
higher, unseen influence. So far as they 
spoke the truth, truth which they had 
discovered in their own hearts and did 


not merely echo from another’s words, 
27 


28 FAITH IN CHRIST 


so far were they actually, literally, divinely 
inspired. And the Bible owes its suprem- 
acy among books first of all to this very 
fact, that its words are aglow with the 
burning convictions, kindled in the living 
experience, of the men who wrote it. 

Read Ezekiel’s account of his initial 
vision. Flaming colors, terrible creatures 
with far-stretching wings, a voice like the 
roar of mighty waters, the star-studded 
firmament and over it a sapphire throne 
surrounded by rainbow splendor—in such 
imagery the prophet tries to give us a 
sense of his first realization of the great- 
ness and majesty of the eternal God. 
Before the glory of the sight he fell on his 
face in abject humility; who was he that 
he should inquire into the awful mysteries 
or seek to interpret to men the will of the 
Infinite? But suddenly, out of the glory, 
a Voice: “Son of man, stand upon thy 
feet, and I will speak with thee.” ! 

The prophets were no prostrate, passive 
instruments, receiving and _ transmitting 
messages which they themselves did not 
understand. “Thus saith the Lord,” was 
the solemn sanction of their preaching, as, 

1 Ezekiel 2 : 1, 


THE INSPIRATION OF THE BIBLE 29 


indeed, it must be the sanction of all ef- 
fective preaching, but they were not in 
any remote sense amanuenses. Their reve- 
lations are testimony to the clearness of 
their own vision, their eloquence is rooted 
in the depth and sincerity of their own 
feelings. 

Looking out upon Israel, Amos saw 
luxury and sensuality rotting the heart 
out of the people of wealth while the poor 
starved. Ridiculed, rebuked, commanded 
to silence, he still could not restrain the 
flood of anger and pity which surged 
within him. Throughout his brief sermons 
we are conscious first of contact with the 
spirit of a righteous man, flaming with 
indignation at the hypocrisy which would 
serve God in feasts and sacrifices while 
it revelled in dissipation and ruthless 
greed. 

The songs of praise with which the Old 
Testament is filled can never be thought 
of as documents handed down out of 
heaven, set by some superior wisdom for 
man’s singing. 


“The heavens declare the glory of God, 
- And the firmament sheweth his handiwork.” 


30 FAITH IN CHRIST 


Better than we can tell it ourselves, this 
poet of a bygone age has told the story of 
our own emotions as we cast our eyes up- 
ward. The song which he has flung down 
the centuries, no man can doubt, is but 
the echo of a sublimer strain which first 
sounded in his own soul. 

The Mohammedans tell us, of their 
Koran, that it is the work of no man, and 
of no company of men, but that, un- 
created and unalterable, it has existed 
since before all beginnings, inscribed on a 
tablet set up in highest heaven. 

The Bible, on the other hand, has never 
been represented as having come down out 
of heaven, but as having grown here on 
the earth. And though we believe that its 
seed was not vitalized.by any human in- 
vention, that the showers and the sun- 
shine which nurtured it came from above 
and its flowers are the flowers of Paradise, 
yet its roots, we know, are deep sunk in 
the soil of our common humanity. De- 
fenders make 2, mistake when they apol- 
ogize for the “human element” in the 
Bible. We are all familiar with their 
favorite figure of the sun-spots. With so 
much brightness and warmth, they ask, 


THE INSPIRATION OF THE BIBLE 31 


why should one complain of an occa- 
sional flaw? It is no case for complaint. 
One need be no scientist to realize that 
the spots are of the essential nature of 
the sun’s formation, that without them the 
sun would not be the sun. And if the 
Bible had come down out of heaven it 
would no longer be the Bible. God’s 
thoughts had to become man’s thoughts 
before they could become intelligible to 
men, as Christ himself could not have 
disclosed God to us had he not first of all 
been a man. 


IV 
MODERN BIBLIOMANCY 


OnE method of Biblical interpretation, 
too childish for serious mention, but too 
prevalent to be passed over in silence, im- 
plies an origin for the Bible neither on 
earth nor in heaven, but in subterranean 
caverns, in witches’ caves, by the light 
of smoking torches, beside a boiling cal- 
dron of newts and frogs. The book is 
searched for obscure references to future 
events, supposed to be embedded in the 
text with all the studied ambiguity of the 
sibyl’s palm-leaves. Here is a passage 
which foretells the Roman Church of the 
twentieth century, and here a verse in- 
tended to describe the present German 
emperor or the prospective Russian ezar. 
A river in Revelation prefigures modern 
Turkey, while a hybrid beast in Daniel 
has been wandering the earth like a dis- 
embodied spirit for something over two 
thousand years, waiting for the British 
Empire or the Chinese Republic to give 


32 


MODERN BIBLIOMANCY 33 


it substance. The mystery of future times, 
which Christ confessed was all dark to 
him,' yields to the exercise of a little in- 
genuity in discovering the key to a lost 
cipher ! 

The prophets of old Israel always made 
their forecasts contingent on the fidelity 
or the recreance of the people concerned, 
but these modern prophets make their 
forecasts contingent on nothing. They 
have the future reduced to chart in such 
mathematical fashion that there is nothing 
for men to do but to sit aside and watch 
the specifications of destruction fulfil them- 
selves. 

Without doubt, the Bible does contain 
forecasts of the Roman Church in the 
twentieth century; and also, by the same 
token, it contains forecasts of the Protes- 
tant Church in the twentieth century, not 
always flattering. It contains convincing 
portraits of German kaiser and Russian 
czar, and also of the maid in your kitchen 
and of the child in your nursery, and of 
me and of you. It reveals springs of his- 
tory precisely as true of England and 
America and Siam as of Assyria and 

1 Mark 13: 32. 


o4 FAITH IN CHRIST 


Babylon and Israel. Its oracles strike 
home to-day, with the nation and with 
the individual, for the very reason that 
they struck home in the day when they 
were first delivered; directed as they were, 
not at anything transitory and accidental, 
but at that which is permanent and uni- 
versal in humanity. 

The Bible is the last book on earth of 
which to try to make a fortune-teller’s 
manual. It was not produced in a cave; 
every page is asparkle with the play of 
sunlight and fresh air, much of it having 
been written, literally, in the open, under the 
wide skies that arch the Syrian hills, with 
a breeze from the Mediterranean fluttering 
the parchment. Its songs have nothing 
even of that stuffy atmosphere of the 
closet and the death-chamber which lurks 
in many a corner of our modern hymnals. 
Entire books were transcribed; almost ver- 
batim, from the stories which mothers 
told their children, of the heroes of the 
nation and the stirring events of the past, 
in a day when the only public school was 
at the door-step of the home. More of 
it yet was transcribed, entirely verbatim, 
from the words of stalwart preachers, in- 


MODERN BIBLIOMANCY 35 


veighing against the crimes of their age 
and calling the people to righteousness. 

From cover to cover there is no place 
for magic cryptograms and Circean am- 
biguities. If John was careful not to 
mention the name of the Beast that he 
denounced, be sure the purpose of his 
omission was not to mystify his “little 
children.”’ More credible is it that he was 
discreet enough not to incite the Beast 
to speedy vengeance. In any case, what- 
ever obscurity we find in the apocalypses 
exists for us largely by reason of our igno- 
rance of the times for which they were 
written; it did not exist for the original 
readers by reason of their ignorance of 
our times. The writers did not intend, in 
cold-blooded mockery, to mystify their 
readers; they intended to enlighten and 
hearten them in the face of pressing perils. 

The Bible is no wonder-book; it is 
literature. Its appeal is not to the wizard 
in us but to the man in us. It is not con- 
cerned with divinations; it is concerned 
with the conduct of life. 


Vv 
THE CREDIBILITY OF SCRIPTURE 


I KNow no means of authenticating the 
Bible in block. On the contrary, there is 
no questioning the fact that it contains 
laws which it would be crime or folly to 
obey, and inconsistencies which it would 
be dishonesty to evade. So much is con- 
ceded by the scholars of every school, 
radical and conservative alike. 

Here, for example, is a law from an 
ancient code: “Thou shalt not eat any- 
thing that dieth of itself; thou shalt give 
it unto the stranger that is within thy 
gates, that he may eat it; or thou mayest 
sell it unto an alien; for thou art a holy 
people unto the Lord thy God.”' Not 
a neighborly distinction, we agree; and if 
we should detect our Jewish butcher serv- 
ing us meat on this principle, it would re- 
quire something more than a quotation 
from Deuteronomy to reconcile us to his 


1 Deuteronomy 14: 21. 
36 


THE CREDIBILITY OF SCRIPTURE 37 


business methods. Explicit permission to 
sell diseased meat to foreigners! We stand 
aghast at such sheer, brazen immorality. 
The same verse closes with another in- 
junction: “Thou shalt not seethe a kid 
in its mother’s milk,” and most of us 
would not insist on the inclusion of this 
bit of legislation in modern cook-books 
for all its threefold repetition in the Mosaic 
law. 

Many of the Biblical laws are no longer 
honored by any of us; like the laws of 
sacrifice, eating, and dress; like the law 
prohibiting interest on loans! which em- 
barrassed the commerce of Europe for 
many centuries, but which we have now 
agreed to forget, as far as the socialists 
will allow us; like the law which sent the 
leper out to beg his living on the streets, 
crying “‘unclean”’ to all the passers-by’— 
we have discovered a more humane method 
of dealing with lepers. 

Various historical discrepancies also ap- 
pear in the Bible which the most uncom- 
promising defenders of the faith have 
never thought of denying. At most they 


1 Exodus 22: 25. Ezekiel 18: 8. 
? Leviticus 13 : 45 f. 


38 FAITH IN CHRIST 


assure us that the errors must have crept 
in through the carelessness of copyists, 
that in the original manuscripts there 
were no such imperfections. And they 
may well challenge us to disprove their 
argument, for there is no possible way by 
which we may know what was in the 
original manuscripts; but neither, so far 
as I can see, is there any possible reason 
why we should care what was in them. 
They will surely not ask any man to be- 
lieve that an “‘original” Bible, now lost 
beyond hope of recovery, has anything 
in particular to do with the salvation of 
his soul. Our Bible, we are all agreed, 
has mistakes in it, and who will can make 
the most of them. 

Many Christian people, it is true, are 
disturbed by the thought of inaccuracies 
in the Bible and think it impolitic, or im- 
polite, to mention them. They have be- 
come persuaded that the validity of their 
Christian experience is somehow bound 
up with the historicity of Jonah and Daniel, 
so that it is really not surprising that they 
should resent sceptical criticism of these 
books. And many of the critics themselves 
have not been wiser; in discrediting such 


THE CREDIBILITY OF SCRIPTURE 39 


narratives they have believed that they 
were doing just that of which faint-hearted 
believers accused them, that they were ac- 
tually undermining the whole structure of 
our religion. 

When the scientist declared that the 
world was round in the face of many plain 
Biblical references to the contrary, there 
was panic in one camp and satisfaction 
in the other. When science announced 
that the world had not been created in 
six days, again there was a common feel- 
ing that the very existence of Christianity 
was at stake. But Christianity is still 
with us while the prophets of evil are all 
but forgotten. And so it will be to the 
end of time, or until we learn that Chris- 
tianity is not dependent on the accuracy 
of Biblical history and science. 

The writers of Scripture got their science 
from the age they lived in, and they got 
their history where they could find it; 
in scores of instances they tell us just what 
the sources of their information were. 
Their claim to distinction lies not in any 
magical knowledge which they possessed 
but in that spiritual insight, which was 
indeed a gift of God, and by means of 


40 FAITH IN CHRIST 


which they took the incidents at hand, 
whether from history or tradition, and 
made them the vehicle for the teaching of 
great spiritual truths. 

What difference, for example, whether 
Jonah be history or parable? The moral 
of the book is not that God is strong enough 
to rescue a man out of a fish’s maw, but 
that the love of God is broad enough to 
embrace a pagan city like Nineveh. And 
the miracle, were it established, would be 
to us no evidence of the truth of the lesson. 
If we have not proven in our own experi- 
ence that the love of God has been wide 
enough to reach across the Atlantic and 
embrace America, we shall surely not be 
moved to credence by the peculiar marine 
experiences of a renegade prophet of three 
thousand years ago. 

Scoffers point to the many contests 
between science and religion in which 
science has achieved final and complete 
triumph, but they fail to notice that relig- 
ion has ordinarily emerged from the con- 
test stronger than before. If history proves 
anything, it proves that religion with its 
Bible is proof against such attacks, not as 
a fort may be—or may not be—proof 


THE CREDIBILITY OF SCRIPTURE 41 


against cannon-balls, but as patriotism is 
proof against cannon-balls. 

The doctrine of the inspiration of Holy 
Scripture is not a dogma received from the 
skies, to be accepted or rejected in ac- 
cordance with our opinion of its credentials: 
it is a truth mined out of experience, to 
be certified only by experience. Through 
the Bible men have found that their eyes 
have been opened to spiritual facts which 
otherwise they had missed, but which, 
having once seen, they can no more deny 
than they can deny their own existence. 

We are under no obligation to believe 
any word of Scripture for the mere reason 
that it is Scripture; we also must stand 
upon our feet. 

“In the beginning God created the 
heaven and the earth”; this do we accept ? 
Then so far, at least, we accept the Bible. 
This do we deny? Then is there certainly 
no hope that we shall ever be persuaded 
to accept it on the authority of Genesis. 
And so we may go through the book, 
sentence by sentence, chapter by chapter, 
from cover to cover. 

When the Ephesians told Paul that they 
had not so much as heard whether there 


42 FAITH IN CHRIST 


were any Holy Spirit, he entered into no 
theological argument, but when he “laid 
his hands upon them, the Holy Spirit came 
on them.”! There was an argument which 
they could understand. Suppose he had 
begun by an exposition of the doctrine of 
the Trinity, and that they had accepted 
the doctrine on his authority; well, after- 
ward they might have passed a_ better 
examination in theology, but of what 
particular use would the knowledge have 
been to them? Merely to know that 
there is a Holy Spirit somewhere in the 
universal scheme of things would be about 
as futile a bit of information as a man 
could well be possessed of. To have the 
omnipotent, divine Spirit take possession 
of your heart and life, this is a different 
matter ! 

The Bible is not a book of travel for 
the instruction of men who prefer the 
comfort of their chimney-corner to the 
exertions of the highroad; it is a handbook 
for travellers.’ It was not designed to 
reveal mysteries, hidden forever from our 
eyes, but so made plain to the writers of 
Scripture that we accept their word as 

1Acts 19 : 6. 


THE CREDIBILITY OF SCRIPTURE 43 


we accept the word of the lecturer back 
from the Sphinx or the Ganges. It under- 
takes a much more marvellous thing: so 
to guide us in our own invasion of the 
land that we may see for ourselves. For 
in this realm of the spirit there is no farthest 
journey which any man of us may not 
take, no remotest country which he may 
not explore. 

The Bible demands none of your credence 
in its teachings, regarding either God or 
man, except as you are compelled to cre- 
dence by virtue of the very fact that it 
tells the truth. 


VI 
OUR INDEPENDENCE OF SCRIPTURE 


Tue desperation with which, in the face 
of facts, men have clung to their belief 
in the historical inerrancy of Scripture 
has been in large part due, I suppose, to 
a fear lest in the general wreck the Gospels 
also might be involved. While they might 
have been willing, without much qualm, 
to admit a question as to certain elements 
in the story of Methuselah or Jonah, 
they have not been so ready to dismiss 
Christ’s life to the realm of legend. And 
yet how are we to distinguish between 
the two? If we are to cast doubt on any 
incident in Old Testament history, what 
prevents us likewise from casting doubt 
on any incident of Matthew or John? 

I am not disposed to insist that men 
treat the New Testament on any other 
basis than that on which they treat the 
rest of the Bible, or indeed on which they 
treat any other historical documents. I 


am not afraid to submit the New Testa- 
44 


OUR INDEPENDENCE OF SCRIPTURE 45 


ment to all the canons of historical crit- 
icism; its evidence is not of so feeble a 
sort that we must make an exception in 
its favor and do not dare hale it before 
the ordinary bar of human reason. 

Discard all one will of it, an irreducible 
minimum remains. The teachings remain. 
And it is one of those teachings that “The 
words that I have spoken unto you are 
spirit, and are life.’”’! At least, we have 
the “‘words”; there is no denying them. 
If Jesus of Nazareth did not utter them, 
they were beyond question uttered, for 
here they are, written down before our 
eyes. 

And here also is our picture of the Christ 
life painted; there is no denying 7. It 
holds its sacred place at the centre of almost 
every home in Christendom. One may 
say that the picture, as painted in the 
Gospels, contains elements that are incon- 
sistent or incredible. Perhaps; make all 
the allowance for them that one will, and 
still, beneath whatever smudgings of the 
brush, we discern the portrait of a Man 
of very definite and remarkable character; 
we catch the outlines of a life of such pur- 

1 John 6 : 63. 


46 FAITH IN CHRIST 


pose and meaning as cannot be mistaken. 
It is quite generally agreed to be the 
noblest man-likeness ever conceived, the 
sublimest interpretation of human life ever 
accomplished on the earth. If we refuse 
to concur in this agreement, it is of little 
consequence what we may be pleased to 
think about the fidelity of the portrait. 
But if we do concur, and after this begin 
to cavil as to whether the portrait is real 
or fanciful, then herein is a marvellous 
thing, indeed: the one example in history 
where art has outshone nature, where 
man’s imitation has transcended God’s 
original. 

Turner’s sunsets may sometimes show 
more brilliant hues, but they are certainly 
never more beautiful than the glory which 
breaks across the sky of any summer 
evening. And when have you ever de- 
scribed the character of your friend but 
at the end of the story you have felt 
the utter inadequacy of your words to 
make men understand his heroism and at- 
tractiveness? So, I know, T hackeray felt 
when he had finished his picture of Colonel 
Newcome, and Shakespeare when he had 
done with Rosalind: they had known 


OUR INDEPENDENCE OF SCRIPTURE 47 


gentlemen and gentlewomen, if not of 
fewer faults, at least of more excellent 
virtues and more seductive graces. When 
have you met a really great man but 
you have discovered in him a largeness 
and power beyond anything you had 
divined from all that you had ever heard 
of him? 

But here were men, are we to under- 
stand, who told the story of their Friend’s 
life in such fashion that others have seen 
in him a loveliness and greatness beyond 
any that he actually possessed, or that 
any man ever possessed; who have man- 
aged to achieve a fourfold portrait more 
exquisite in its compelling charm, more 
exalted in its dignity, than anything ever 
produced in the great miracle-shop of 
Nature herself! And these incomparable 
artists were a company of humble Judean 
preachers otherwise unknown to fame! 
The scepticism calls for heroic credulity. 

One further fact confronts us, not in 
the Book, but in life. Down through the 
wide continent of human history flows 
no other river so majestic in its sweep as 
this stream which we know under the 
name of Christianity. If much pondering 


48 FAITH IN CHRIST 


has confused our thought on this matter, 
an evening’s reading in the social life of 
any age or any land apart from its in- 
fluence, or even an hour. or two in any 
Bowery mission, will perhaps serve to 
quicken our appreciations. This stream 
must have had a source. Does the Source 
as depicted in the gospels seem exaggerated 
in view of the river of beneficence that has 
flowed from it? Would some lesser thing 
seem more convincing, or shall we think 
rather, that any error in our thought of 
Jesus probably lies in our failure to grasp 
anything like the full measure of his great- 
ness? 

But, after all, the first question for us 
is not as to our attitude toward the his- 
torical character of the record. There is 
a crucial, preliminary inquiry which con- 
fronts us and on which, meanwhile, the 
question of historic facts may wait. Which 
is not to say, and I do not mean, that the 
historical incidents were of minor impor- 
tance. If Christ had not come, and lived 
and died as he did, we have no knowledge 
that the world would not be in darkness 
to this day. But our belief, or refusal to 
believe, does not in the least affect the 


OUR INDEPENDENCE OF SCRIPTURE 49 


historic facts. Whatever specific work 
was needed for the salvation of men, was 
performed, as is abundantly evidenced by 
thousands of men, and thousands of thou- 
sands, saved. And that work there is no 
undoing. Marathon and Tours were fought, 
and the fruits of them are still secure, 
though their very memory should perish 
from the earth. Last year’s harvest still 
fed the multitudes, though we have no 
statistics of the bushels garnered. The 
Deed Done is forever proof against the 
scepticism of later years. 

But the Thought of yesterday must 
live on in the mind of to-day, or it is noth- 
ing. While our opinion of the record of 
Christ’s life will have no effect whatever 
on the truthfulness of the record, can 
detract no iota from the measure of the 
work that was accomplished for us, our 
opinion of the thought which the cen- 
turies have handed down to us is beyond 
all reckoning fateful for ourselves and for 
the world. 

Do we accept the gospel conception of 
God and of human life, of the relation 
between man and man and between man 
and God? This is the first question for 


59 FAITH IN CHRIST 


us to face, and at the outset we need not 
trouble ourselves in regard to any nine- 
teen-hundred-year-old facts, however im- 
measurably important those facts may 
have been. If we do accept it, we shall 
find ourselves involved in consequences, 
unless I am much mistaken, which will 
make it very easy for us to believe that 
behind the record is reality, substance, 
and not shadow. 

But first we must ask, What think we 
of these ideas of life and character which 
the record contains? And the substantia- 
tion of these truths of the spirit does not 
wait on any historic testimony or fine-spun 
argument. Their evidence, the only evi- 
dence to which in the nature of the case 
they are subject, consists in those creden- 
tials which they bear in their own heart. 

“Not that we have lordship over your 
faith,”’! said Paul, in a passage strangely 
seldom quoted; which means, if it means 
anything, that he had no wish arbitrarily 
to impose his beliefs on other men. Ut- 
terly sure as he was of the truth of his con- 
victions, he desired others to have the 
same assurance in themselves, not to lean 
on his assurance. There is enough dy- 

111 Corinthians 1 : 24. 


OUR INDEPENDENCE OF SCRIPTURE 51 


namite in the little clause to blow up whole 
ecclesiastical hierarchies and whole theo- 
logical libraries, which is perhaps one 
reason for the circumspection with which 
it has been used. And I have no mind to 
warm any man against Paul’s spiritual 
leadership; before I have done with the 
subject I have something very specific 
to say by way of commending it. But 
neither have I any mind to quote him, or 
any other Biblical writer, as an authority 
whose word must be blindly accepted. 
For I recognize, as he recognized, that 
any truth which we should receive merely 
because he delivered it, because we find it 
in the Bible, would be no more a part of 
our life than the bird among the branches 
is part of the life of the tree. 

When Paul went down to preach in 
Corinth, why did the Corinthians accept 
his teachings? Not, obviously, because of 
their confidence in a book; not because of 
any peculiar reverence for apostles, and 
we hear nothing of miracles. Why was 
Amos accepted as a prophet by the faith- 
ful in Israel? His sermons were no part 
of a Bible then, and again we read of no 
miracles by which he attested his revela- 
tion. To his contemporaries he was merely 


52 FAITH IN CHRIST 


an unordained, itinerary preacher. How 
does the Chinaman know that the mis- 
sionary is telling the truth when he un- 
folds the story of Jesus Christ, explaining 
that the world is under the governance of 
one supreme God, who is not only the 
God but the Father of mankind, and that 
the highest life is to be found in that losing 
of self which leads to the finding of him? 
How does your Chinaman know that all 
this is not a pretty fable from the West? 
How does it happen that the joy of a great 
discovery thrills through his awakening 
spirit and that he also, like the disciple by 
the seaside, stretches out his hand and 
cries, My Lord and my God? The answer 
lies, and can lie, in nothing else than the 
self-evidencing power of spiritual truth. 

With the Bible, as with all other books 
and so-called authorities, so much of it 
as we find true in us we must perforce ac- 
cept, and so much of it as we find untrue 
in us we must assume that we are under 
the same divine compulsion to reject— 
though we shall be wise not to be too pre- 
cipitate with our rejections, remembering 
that “ great truths are greatly won.” 


VII 
THE NEED OF AUTHORITY 


ARE we then to be plunged into a chaos 
of individualism, bidding farewell forever 
to the old dream of orthodoxy, of a body of 
doctrine accepted in all ages, in all lands, 
and by all believers: quod semper, quod 
ubique, quod ab omnibus? A noble concep- 
tion was this, worthy to possess the imag- 
ination of Christendom; the world would 
be poorer for its loss. But how is it to be 
saved ? 

Several expedients, we may remember, 
have already been tried. Councils of the 
bishops legislated, under the auspices of 
the emperor, but they were compelled 
to take up the sword by way of enforcing 
their legislation. It is at best a Sorry uni- 
formity that you obtain by merely killing 
off the dissenters, and even such mock 
uniformity was never achieved, for the dis- 
senters multiplied faster than they could 


be disposed of. 
53 


54 FAITH IN CHRIST 


A single, sovereign pope was the next 
experiment, but the result was still more 
conspicuously unsuccessful. 

The Reformers started with a recognition 
of the sovereignty of the individual mind 
and conscience, but the old dream of uni- 
formity was by no means abandoned. It 
soon appeared that the grant of liberty 
was accompanied with the proviso that, 
though thinking for themselves, all men 
were expected to arrive at the same con- 
clusions. And once more the councils 
were called to determine what these con- 
clusions were. Once more, likewise, here- 
sies arose to disturb the peace of the 
Church. 

In these latter days, however, the curse 
of heresy has lost not only its terror but 
its shame, and correspondingly orthodoxy 
has lost its pride. We have not only failed 
to achieve uniformity in our doctrine, we 
have ceased to desire it. The ordmary 
man makes a boast of the confession that 
he is something of a heretic; which is the 
‘nevitable end of all efforts at uniformity 
through decrees of popes and councils. 
The dream of a world-wide orthodoxy 
built on the recognition of a common 


THE NEED OF AUTHORITY 55 


authority could never have resulted in 
any other way. Spiritual truth must be 
spoken, by divine voice, in the ear of the 
individual, and this law there is no evad- 
ing. In the interest of harmony, of con- 
venience, will you try to soften the rigor 
of its workings? At best you will secure 
a false harmony which, honored to-day, 
will to-morrow be despised. Any faith 
which we accept merely at another’s word 
is bogus, and must go the way of all cheats 
and frauds. 

Nevertheless, orthodoxy is not yet a 
forlorn hope. Its promise lies not in any 
unity of authority, but in the unity of 
truth. I accept that which is true in me, 
and you accept that which is true in you, 
but truth is not therefore duplex or mul- 
tiple; it is one. If any two men think 
straight, they think alike; so far at least 
the Reformers were right. 

Looking upward at night, we all see 
stars. If your vision is clearer than mine 
you may see more stars, and those which 
I also see you may see more sharply; but 
where you see stars I do not see dragons 
and flying-fish. Except in an utterly 
diseased state of the mental vision, men 


56 FAITH IN CHRIST 


apprehend as true nothing but the truth. 
They may see the truth dimly, distorted, 
but it is still truth, reality, that men see, 
not falsehood and unreality. It is some- 
thing that is there that impresses itself 
on the retina, not something that is not 
there. The religions of India and Arabia 
owe their power over men, not to their 
delusions, but to their veracities. No 
wildest theory was ever promulgated and 
accepted on the earth, even among the 
faddists of our pale, parlor cults, but that 
some sound arguments could be adduced 
in support of it, and men have believed in 
it, in spite of its imbecilities, on account of 
the glimmer of truth which it contained. 
In the matter of principles, no man has 
ever yet been entirely sincere and entirely 
mistaken, unless he was at the same time 
entirely insane. And history ought to 
teach us to beware how recklessly we dis- 
tribute the charge of insanity. For Chris- 
tians it is enough to remember that cer- 
tain members of Christ’s own household 
would have had him withdraw from his 
ministry because they thought he was “be- 
side himself.’’! The extravagances of the 
1 Mark 3: 21. 


THE NEED OF AUTHORITY 57 


most unconventional of heretics, in art and 
politics and economics as well as in relig- 
ion, will generally repay the philosopher’s 
attention. They will be found always to 
contain some nugget of true gold, which the 
rest of us may possibly have overlooked. 
Certainly we have no right to condemn 
them until we qualify ourselves as critics 
by sympathy with the other’s point of 
view. It is scarcely too much to say, that 
a man has no right to criticise any creed 
in which he does not believe; in which, 
that is, he does not appreciate the ele- 
ment of truth. | 

“Every man that hath heard from the 
Father, and hath learned, cometh unto 
me.’' So sure was Christ of the reality 
and unity of truth, and so sure also of the 
validity of men’s spiritual perceptions. Be- 
cause he spoke the truth, therefore he 
knew that every other man who attended 
to the voice within must ultimately find 
himself in his presence; as the man who 
stands on the mountain top knows that 
every other man who climbs and continues 
climbing must at last reach the same pin- 
nacle. 

1 John 6 : 45. 


58 FAITH IN CHRIST 


This day is the old dream of a world- 
wide unity of Church doctrine in no small 
measure, not promised, but realized. There 
has been no day since Pentecost when it 
was not already more of a reality than of 
a dream. Origen, Augustine, Bernard of 
Clairvaux, Aquinas, A Kempis, Luther, Cal- 
vin, Arminius, Grotius, Fox, Wesley, New- 
man, Brooks—make the list as long as 
you will, gather it from all the schools— 
the men are brothers all! We link their 
names with little sense of incongruity. 
Their differences were many and con- 
spicuous; their agreements, however less 
superficially conspicuous, were much more 
considerable. The strength of each was 
not so much in any article of his creed 
peculiar to himself as it was in that faith 
which he held in common with the rest. 

I may seem to have dismissed the au- 
thorities completely and even contemp- 
tuously; I hasten to welcome them back 
with due honor. The truth is, I accept 
them all; not the Bible only, but popes 
and councils, tradition, creeds, confessions, 
and whatever else there may be in which 
good men have seemed to hear an authori- 
tative voice. — 


THE NEED OF AUTHORITY 59 


As for my popes, I claim merely the 
right to a voice in their nomination. One 
need not be a benighted monarchist to 
recognize truth in the old doctrine of the 
divine right of kings, a divine sanction to 
all duly constituted government; but one 
may still believe that the man who now 
happens to occupy the seat of authority 
has no right to his position, either divine 
or human. One may agree with Newman 
in his general contention that a loving God 
would not leave the world without some 
living voice through which he might speak 
to mankind, but it remains a fair ques- 
tion whether the man who happens to 
have been elected Bishop of Rome is the 
chosen instrument. 

Several score of Church dignitaries have 
gathered in an Italian hall and, after 
much formality, have designated the voice 
through which God is to speak. It is still 
to be determined whether God will ratify 
the election, whether he will indeed de- 
liver his messages through this mouth- 
piece, so designated. Perhaps the pro- 
cedure has been as ingenious as any that 
could be devised; perhaps, even, it may 
present a reasonable argument for divine 


60 FAITH IN CHRIST 


sanction. No matter; in simple, historic 
fact, is it the Bishop of Rome through whom 
God has made his most conspicuous reve- 
lations to mankind, in whose speech men 
have most clearly recognized the divine 
voice, who has chiefly moulded the moral 
and theological thought of the centuries? 
Newman himself says not; for purposes 
of his own, as we have already seen, he 
draws attention to the very small part the 
popes have taken in the development of 
Christian doctrine. “It is individuals,” 
he says, “‘and not the Holy See, who have 
taken the initiative and given the lead to 
Catholic minds in theological inquiry.”’! 
I do not doubt that Newman’s own in- 
fluence on the thinking of Christian Eng- 
land, even of Roman Catholic England, 
was larger than that of all the popes who 
reigned during his career. | 

As my pope I shall choose the man who 
seems, to me and to others, actually to 
have spoken with divine power. The real 
spokesmen of divinity, the true leaders of 
the Church, have ever been elected by 
very informal methods, sometimes be- 
latedly, always with many dissenting voices 

1 Apologia, p. 236. 


THE NEED OF AUTHORITY 61 


in the beginning, but their attestation has 
at least lain in their own words of fire and 
works of power and not in the ballots of 
a college of cardinals. 

The doctrine of papal infallibility was 
not made an article of faith till less than a 
half century ago, and it was then guarded 
by strict limitations. I sympathize with 
the hesitancy of the Roman Church to 
cominit itself to this doctrine, finding my- 
self of much the same mind in regard to 
my popes. It is a large and dangerous 
word, infallibility; and yet, guardedly and 
with due time for explanations, I should 
be willing to risk it. 

I recognize the clearness of vision of 
these outstanding figures in the history 
of Christian thought, these spiritual 
geniuses of the ages, and I gladly avail 
myself of the privilege of walking by their 
light. What they announce I must, of 
. course, “find true in me, or reject’; merely 
to accept their doctrines in the raw with- 
out myself seeing and feeling the necessary 
truth of them, would be as pusillanimous 
as it would be profitless. And their nega- 
tions do not weigh heavily with me, for 
no one of them, I know, compassed the 


62 FAITH IN CHRIST 


whole range of truth. But when one of 
these, the Great, the Far Seeing, the 
Quick to Hear, announces a discovery in 
the world of the spirit where he is most 
at home, then shall I peer into the dark- 
ness to catch the same vision, I shall 
strain my ears to hear the same message; 
sure of this, that that which they saw 
was real and not hallucination. 

I accept the doctrine of the papacy; 
only my popes shall be the real and great 
popes, fathers, in the line of the veritable 
Apostolic Succession, appointed of God to 
their high office and acclaimed by the 
unanimous voice of Christendom. The 
Roman doctrine of the papacy is a sublime 
truth frozen, a kingly form decked out in 
the crown and all the regalia of its rank 
and preserved in ice. “If any man willeth 
to do his will,” said Christ, “‘he shall know 
of the teaching, whether it is of God,” ! 
according to which principle Alexander 
VI, for example, was not the one man on 
earth conspicuously qualified to be chosen 
as an oracle. 

Likewise I believe in the councils. But, 
once more, my councils shall be real par- 

; 1 John 7 : 17. 


a 


THE NEED OF AUTHORITY 63 


liaments of Christendom, not nominated 
by scheming politicians, Roman emperors, 
or Italian prelates, or even American 
divines, and not constituted of those who 
happen by devious ways to have attained 
to high ecclesiastical office, but represen- 
tative of the vast Christian democracy; 
their decisions no smooth political com- 
promises which express the actual faith 
of nobody on earth, no dominating fiat 
of majorities, but the unanimous expres- 
_ sion of the Christian consciousness. And 
there is, as I have suggested, a large body 
of so-called cardinal Christian doctrine in 
which all Christian men believe, accepted 
and preached wherever the name of Christ 
is known. 

Among the various articles of faith 
which have been commonly accepted by 
the Christian consciousness of the ages, 
if I find some which at first reading seem 
to me false or meaningless, I shall not 
lightly trust my own perceptions, denying 
the thousand fold testimony of my peers 
and superiors; I shall be at pains to under- 
stand their meaning, hidden as it may be 
under the forms of ancient verbiage or 
outworn scientific conceptions, and to dis- 


64 FAITH IN CHRIST 


cover for myself the light of truth which 
they contain. 

I am making no plea for the reduction 
of any man’s creed to the terms of some 
common deposit of truth. It is a fair 
question whether the creed of the Church, 
or of the churches, ought not to be so re- 
duced, but for the individual such a sur- 
render would be suicidal and fatal in its 
effect on the progress of knowledge. It 
would be as if two men were climbing a 
mountain, making their way upward by 
different paths, each having an outlook 
of his own, and were of a sudden, in the 
interest of unity, to turn and go back tll 
their paths should converge. The unity 
to be sought is not below but above. 

The controversy between the advocates 
of external authority and the advocates 
of inner enlightenment is a case in point. 
Newman’s demand for an external au- 
thority is not to be met by the mystic’s 
account of a direct communion between 
the human soul and God, for we need the 
revelations of other men in order both to 
educate our own spiritual perceptions and 
to safeguard these perceptions against ec- 
centricity and illusion. But neither is 


THE NEED OF AUTHORITY 65 


the mystic’s doctrine of direct communion 
to be categorically denied in favor of New- 
man’s divinely appointed oracle, for all 
the oracles mean nothing to us except as 
through them our own vision is quickened 
to gaze, open-eyed, upon the Truth. We 
cannot fully understand either Newman 
or the mystic until we arrive at a point 
from which we can see that both were 
right, and also by the same token that 
both were partial and therefore so far 
wrong. 

Whatever there be in the history of 
Christian thought, or of human thought 
for the matter of that, which any pure 
soul has discerned as true, especially what- 
ever there be that any considerable group 
of pure-hearted men and women has dis- 
cerned as true, I shall be very hesitant to 
dismiss as mere illusion. My faith in my 
own spiritual perceptions would not stand 
the strain of such sweeping denials; for 
if these men were utterly confident only 
to be utterly mistaken, what reason have 
I to assume that my own confidence is 
not as deceptive? 


Vill 
THE AUTHORITY OF THE BIBLE 


For nearly two thousand years Christen- 
dom has united in paying peculiar respect 
to a certain company of men, some known 
by name, others anonymous, as the pioneers 
in all spiritual discovery, the only wholly 
trustworthy guides in the land of the un- 
seen. | 

The various books of the Bible were 
chosen out of a vast literature, not by the 
mere judgment of ecclesiastical assemblies, 
but in the gradual process of a democratic 
recognition of their spiritual qualities. It 
is true that the councils legislated a few 
doubtful books into the collection and, 
largely on doctrinal grounds, legislated a 
few out, but in the main they only set 
their seal on documents which had already 
established themselves in the hearts of the 
people. And the democracy which thus 
culled and preserved the books of Scripture, 
like the democracy which has since stamped 


them with its approval, consisted of those 
66 


THE AUTHORITY OF THE BIBLE 67 


very men and women whose own religious 
thinking and emotions have most con- 
spicuously commended themselves to the. 
respect of the world. 

If we had an anthology of Greek prose 
and poetry collected during the course of 
the classical history of Greece in accor- 
dance with the consensus of the opinions 
of the Greek people, we should have some- 
thing corresponding to the Bible in the 
field of pure literature; its standards 
esthetic instead of, as in the Bible, re- 
ligious or theological. Whatever literary 
crudities might be found within its covers, 
one would be slow to believe that any 
production which had been accorded a 
place there by the common judgment of 
the Greek mind was totally lacking in 
pronounced and even distinguished literary 
qualities. 

Literary crudities, however, we should 
undoubtedly find, especially in the earlier 
sections, and in like fashion we must 
expect to find theological and moral cru- 
dities in the Bible. 

It is to be remembered that the Bible 
did not spring into life full-grown, but 
is the record of a gradual revelation. 


68 FAITH IN CHRIST 


Sceptics point to Samuel’s cruelty when 
he reported God’s will to Saul, command- 
ing that the king was to “smite Amalek, 
and utterly destroy all that they have, 
and spare them not; but slay both man 
and woman, infant and suckling, ox and 
sheep, camel and ass.” 1 And the picture 
does not brighten as we read on that the 
prophet, angered by Saul’s single act of 
mercy in sparing the life of his fellow king, 
drew his own sword and “‘hewed Agag in 
pieces before the Lord.” What manner 
of “spiritual perception” was it that so 
interpreted the mind of God? 

It was one step in a gradual revelation, 
or if you please in a gradual understand- 
ing of the divine character. Saul’s act of 
mercy, be it noted, was not really an act 
of mercy at all, for he spared the king not 
out of magnanimity but in order to swell 
the glory of his triumphal procession. If 
others had been spared, they would have 
owed their lives only to Saul’s thirst for 
slaves, not to his humanity. Samuel did 
not make war any more merciful, it is 
true; he merely made it less mercenary; 
he merely did not consider mercy, belong- 


1T Samuel, 15: 3. 


THE AUTHORITY OF THE BIBLE 69 


ing, as he did, to an age when the idea of 
mercy to a conquered foe had not yet 
arisen in the most sensitive conscience. 
But he did see the evil of predatory raids: 
there is to be no plunder, was his oracle, 
and this represents the only change on 
which he was insisting in the military 
code of the time. Many of the Arab tribes 
virtually lived on the product of their 
armed excursions, but henceforth we hear 
of no such excursions in the history of 
Israel. 

Even the command in regard to diseased 
meat was doubtless an advance over former 
customs, in that it did prohibit the sale 
of such to brother Israelites. The duties 
a man owed to those outside his own nation 
had to wait until the brotherhood of Israel 
was widened to embrace the brotherhood 
of man. 

Later years brought riper wisdom. 
From century to century the human con- 
science was gradually enlightened. Any 
schoolboy of to-day could instruct Samuel 
in the mind of God, but any schoolboy 
would not be so well qualified to instruct 
Paul and John, or. even Amos and Isaiah. 
Not that these men compassed the full 


70 FAITH IN CHRIST 


range of spiritual truth, for we know they 
did not; the world has since learned lessons 
as to the application of their principles to 
the question of slavery, for example, which 
we have no reason to suppose they ap- 
preciated, which certainly they did not 
teach. But they were men of peculiarly 
sane judgment and sound convictions, of 
peculiarly original and genuine spiritual 
experience, and there are few of us, I take 
it, who after reading them do not feel our- 
selves better qualified to sit as their pupils 
than as their masters. 

I have no desire to thrust them on any 
man as divinely attested authorities, as 
I know it would serve little purpose to 
try. Merely, I recognize the clearness of 
their spiritual vision and find my own 
perceptions quickened and clarified by their 
revelations. I remember that a very great 
number of other men, including the best 
men I have known, the best men of his- 
tory, have had the same experience. And 
I am confident that if any man will read 
them, sympathetically, he will find in 
them what others have found, because 
truth is one, and every human heart re- 
sponds, in its best moments, to the truth. 


II 
THE SON OF MAN 


I 
THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH 


In these latter days theology has fallen 
upon disrepute, and men take pride in the 
possession of a creed which may be en- 
grossed in red and gold on a bit of card- 
board to be hung over their beds. 

The probability is, however, that in 
such crisp confessions certain of the articles 
are missing. A man’s creed, his actual 
working creed, must contain his philosophy 
of the universe, including, for example, his 
politics, his business code, his definition 
of success, his opinions on war and music 
and socialism and baseball and churches 
and spelling-reform and monogamy. In the 
reasons he gives himself for the make-up 
of his ballot you might find a few of the 
missing articles; in the letter he writes 
to his salesman a few more, and a few more 


still in the thoughts with which he con- 
Peal 


12 FAITH IN CHRIST 


templates a trip to the seashore or to Eu- 
rope, in the phrases with which he greets 
his children on coming home of an evening, 
in the prayer which he breathes in one of 
life’s emergencies. I doubt if in any case 
it may be compressed within the limits 
of a pretty motto. 

The suggestion is frequently made that 
the hope for church union lies, not in the 
adoption of a common creed, but in the 
recognition of a common purpose. The 
difficulty is, of course, that it is our creed— 
our veritable and real creed, not the phrases 
we learn by heart in church—which de- 
termines our purposes. If men are at 
variance politically, who would think of 
proposing that they should give up the 
attempt to agree in principles and be 
content to unite on a common platform ? 
The suggestion nevertheless has this merit, 
that if we should learn to think less of 
creeds and more of purposes we might 
discover what our real creeds are—an 
enterprise in which heretofore we have 
not been signally successful—and might 
find that they contain fewer conflicts than 
we had supposed. 

Our theology, moreover, if it is to be 


THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH 73 


true, may not be simpler than life, and 
life is not conspicuously simple; on the 
contrary, it is quite overwhelmingly com- 
plex. The real weakness of old theologies 
was not in their overelaboration, it was 
precisely in their logical simplicity. The 
theologians whose ‘‘systems” are still em- 
bodied in our standard creeds and con- 
fessions, all lived before the time of Bacon 
and Descartes, in a day when the processes 
of logic were honored, even in the sciences, 
above any careful research in field and 
laboratory. 

Logic has a way of moulding its sym- 
metrical forms while the stuff of life slips 
from under its hands and spreads away 
formless, unmindful of the potter’s art. 
This lesson the physicist and biologist 
learned long ago, the psychologist has 
been learning it of more recent years, and 
if the theologian has been slower than 
others in learning, the lesson is still his to 
learn, soon or late. 

The change of method must, in the 
nature of the case, involve confusion. One 
newly discovered fact in the realm of 
physics is enough to throw all our physical 
theories into chaos; very foundations have 


74 FAITH IN CHRIST 


given way under the antics of radium. 
When the theologian in turn leaves his 
study to go out on a deliberate search for 
facts in the world of the spirit, it need be 
no occasion for surprise if now and then 
he comes upon an item which hitherto 
had escaped him; and certainly, when the 
discovery is made, it need be no occasion 
for surprise if he finds that his former 
theories need a considerable readjustment. 

Nor need we expect that he will be 
ready with his readjustment on the in- 
stant. A child may have his blocks all 
nicely arranged, but hand him a new block 
and bid him fit that into his structure; 
the process may entail a good deal of 
tearing down, and you will not blame him 
if the first result of his efforts is disorder. 

In the great game we play with truth 
new blocks are forever forthcoming. It 
is no child’s puzzle, done up neatly in a 
hardwood box, to be worked over dili- 
gently, but at last, once for all, to be 
solved. It is characterized by the baffling 
quality of infinity. The truth about so 
fragmentary a thing as a drop of water 
is infinite; or, if it has borders, they 
are far beyond any of our comprehension. 


a noe - 


THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH 75 


We shall surely be unsafe in assuming that 
the facts are all known regarding human 
souls and their relation to the universe 
and its God. That old theologians were 
logically consistent meant only that the 
facts then at hand, or so many of them 
as happened to be chosen for attention, 
were symmetrically arranged. If the ar- 
rangement had been less symmetrical, less 
of the nature of a closed system with no 
place for further facts, it would not have 
been to the theologians’ discredit; on the 
contrary, an occasional paradox might have 
been accepted as a very hall-mark of 
genuineness. That the average preacher 
of to-day is less ready with his answer 
to a “hard question,” is by no means 
necessarily an evidence of the degeneracy 
of the age. 

The man who thinks of religion as the 
ingenious invention of the theologians 
themselves, rather than as a thing of life 
and reality, will naturally continue to prefer 
a theological structure which is symmetrical 
and complete; while they are about it, is 
the idea, they might as well turn out a 
finished product. Here cynical folk, like 
the editors of metropolitan dailies, join 


76 FAITH IN CHRIST 


hands with the multitudes who still hold 
by the traditions of the anointed priest- 
hood. 

But the man who sees in theology the 
effort of a poor human intelligence to deal 
with the very materials of life, and of life 
in its highest forms, realizes that we are 
in a different world from that of the 
mathematician. If we were to write out 
the story of each of our days with all their 
arduous labors, at the end of how few of 
the pages should we have the confidence 
to set down Euclid’s boast, quod erat 
faciendum—which was to be done! And 
with all our attempts at the solution of 
life’s problems it has not, I think, been 
the wisest men who have been readiest 
to write at the last chapter’s end, quod 
erat demonstrandum—which was to be 
proved. | 

For all of which it will not do to forget, 
even in passing, that life itself, in its un- 
assuming, matter-of-fact way, brings its 
own certitudes. While the scientists are 
groping hesitantly toward the secret of 
the seed’s growth, the farmer goes on sow- 
ing his grain and gathering his harvests. 
While the theologians are speculating about 


THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH ad. 


the relation between God and the human 
soul, Christian experience testifies con- 
fidently: “I know him whom I have be- 
lieved, and I am persuaded that he is able 
to guard that which I have committed 
unto him against that day.’’! 

11I Timothy 1 : 12. 


I | 
THE HEART OF THE CREED 


“Wuat must I do to be saved ?”?! cried 
the Philippian jailer, and at once the 
answer came, with firm assurance: “Be- 
heve on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou 
shalt be saved.” 

But what if the jailer had never before 
heard of Christ? When a man lives in 
a prison, great events may betide in the 
world without his knowledge. ‘Believe 
on Christ!” we may imagine his astonished 
exclamation: “‘Who is Christ, and what 
has he to do with me, and in what fashion 
am I to believe on him?” It was not 
necessary for him to suggest the question, 
for the disciples must have realized the 
inadequacy of their reply. We read on, 
significantly, that “they spake unto him 
the word of the Lord.” That first, brief 
injunction was merely the pregnant in- 
troduction to their real answer. 

The whole Bible is commentary on the 


1 Acts 16 : 30. 
78 


THE HEART OF THE CREED 79 


meaning of this apparently simple formula. 
And even the Bible is not a complete 
commentary. Practical implications are 
involved in it which from day to day men 
have to discover for themselves. A half- 
century since conscientious men were still 
at odds over its bearing on the question 
of slavery; that a man believed on Christ, 
did it mean merely that he should deal 
with his slaves kindly, or that he should 
set his own slaves free, or that he should 
join in a crusade to abolish the whole in- 
stitution of slavery from the earth? The 
Bible did not speak so clearly on the sub- 
ject but that it left room for much honest 
and bitter difference of opinion. It was 
only a couple of generations ago that a 
distinguished Brooklyn clergyman preached 
a sermon on the text, “Come ye out from 
among them and be ye separate’’; and the 
sons of Belial from whom the faithful 
Brooklynites were bidden to hold them- 
selves aloof were none other than the 
abolitionists. 

All our creed, and confessions, our theol- 
ogies, our treatises on Christian ethics, 
are but expansions of the disciples’ concise 
formula. Happily, however, it is not nec- 


80 FAITH IN CHRIST 


essary that a man should master libraries 
in order to share in the benefits of Chris- 
tian discipleship. After one evening’s in- 
struction, we are told, the Philippian jailer 
was baptized and rejoiced. 

It would be exceedingly interesting to 
know precisely of what this instruction con- 
sisted. We are not told in the narrative, 
but it is not difficult to surmise with a 
close approximation to certainty. 

The New Testament begins with a four- 
fold story of Christ’s life, and no doubt 
the answer of Paul and Silas to the jailer’s 
question began with, and in the main 
consisted of, a recital of the most signif- 
icant events in this same life story. It 
was quite inevitable that. when the dis- 
ciples went out to preach their new gospel 
their first effort should have been to give 
men a knowledge of Christ, what he said, 
what he did, how he died, and how he rose 
again from the dead. Only after such a 
recital could there have been any point 
in their demand that men should believe 
on him. 

And when the story was told there was 
still no pressing need for explanations. 
After the recital I do not imagine that 


THE HEART OF THE CREED 81 


the disciples were ever confronted, at the 
outset, with the further question which 
seems logically necessary: “‘But what do 
you mean by believing on him?” For 
the story comes to every man as a chal- 
lenge and an invitation; it makes a cer- 
tain definite and immediate appeal to the 
human heart, as unmistakable as the ap- 
peal of the sunrise. And the natural, 
spontaneous response to this appeal is 
what the disciples meant by belief, or 
faith. 

The human mind, however, is never 
entirely unsophisticated; it insists at once 
on rationalizing its intuitions. No doubt, 
there were very excellent Christians before 
there was anything of a formulated Chris- 
tian theology. Very excellent Christians 
are produced to-day—in some of the mis- 
sions, for example—entirely apart from the 
intellectual atmosphere of the schools. 
And because of this certain men would 
abolish theology altogether; they would 
have us believe that Paul was much to 
be blamed for introducing it into the 
Church. But Paul was no confirmed dog- 
matist, cumbering his disciples with a mass 
of doctrine in regard to matters about 


82 FAITH IN CHRIST 


which they had not otherwise inquired. 
They had already inquired, and in many 
instances had received false answers, which 
were reflected in loose living. A man 
cannot forever continue to think crookedly 
and live straight. 

In the very earliest days we find the 
young Christians analyzing the leap of 
faith which they had hazarded, with re- 
sults that were anything but successful. 
They interpreted faith as a mere cold 
acceptance of certain external facts of 
Christian teaching, and one after another 
we find the apostles combating this shal- 
low, but apparently prevalent, conception. 
There was desperate need of combating 
it, for the young converts were content to 
lve as if faith were nothing more than 
this. And it would not serve now to re- 
call them to the early intuitive response 
of their hearts to the story of Christ’s 
life. Nothing would serve but that their 
false definition should be replaced by a 
definition that was adequate and true. 

Paul’s great theological passages in- 
variably issue in practical injunctions to 
godliness, and so all vital theology has 
found its principal motive in the desire to 


THE HEART OF THE CREED 83 


prevent the divorce of religion from con- 
duct. Various expedients have been de- 
vised by way of abolishing this most 
inveterate and calamitous of divorce evils. 
One of our historic confessions discovers 
the bond of union in gratitude: If Christ 
Saves us on the mere ground of our faith 
in him, it is argued, then ought we out of 
common thankfulness to live such lives as 
he would desire of us.1. But though there 
is no Christian who fails to recognize every 
day of his life this compulsion of gratitude, 
we yet realize nowadays that this does not 
go to the root of the matter. More pro- 
found was another historic solution: that 
if any man turns to Christ in faith he is 
in some miraculous manner filled with a 
new spirit of righteousness.2 A proper 
understanding of Christian teaching re- 
veals the bond as yet more vital. Religion 
and conduct, faith and good works are 
seen to be no longer separable, the twain 
become in reality one flesh. 


' Heidelberg Catechism, Question 86. 
* Westminster Confession, chap. XIII. 


iil 
CREED AND CONDUCT 


Farr is the key-word of Christianity, 
but likewise is it the key-word of all human 
life. That which a man believes deter- 
mines his character, determines of neces- 
sity all that he does, all that he is. 

Here, for example, is a man who believes 
exclusively in the value of money. He 
asks for nothing else, desires nothing else, 
in nothing else recognizes either pleasure 
or profit; his only satisfaction is in the 
thought of the money he has gained, and 
his only hope is in the prospect of gaining 
more. Offer him a possession of different 
sort, a beautiful house, the love of a child, 
the respect of his neighbors, the pride of 
work well done, any of the things that stir 
the sentiments of other men, and he will 
have none of them. In these he has no 
faith, he sees in them no value, for him; 
he has faith in money, and in money alone. 

Knowing so much about your man, you 


know all that is to be known. In the 
84 


ee 
ph 


CREED AND CONDUCT 85 


knowledge of his faith are laid bare his 
character, his career, and his destiny. He 
is a miser; he will spend his life grubbing 
for gold; and at last, if he have soul enough 
left to make the Great Transit, he will be 
lost, as how could he but be with his sole 
occupation gone and his sole passion left 
objectless ? 

Every voluntary action of a man’s life 
is performed with the deliberate intention 
of securing some good, for himself or an- 
other. If he had no faith in anything he 
would sit dormant on a log until he starved 
to death. Herein, in fact, lies the secret 
of most of the apathy and indolence which 
we find among men. All their lives they 
have never had a taste of anything really 
wholesome and appetizing. They have 
been so poor perhaps that they have 
known nothing except squalor and drudg- 
ery, or they have been so rich that they 
have known nothing except frivolous plea- 
sures. And it makes little difference which; 
in one case they become stolid and sottish, 
in the other they become blasé and bored. 
In neither case is there any zest in living, 
because they know nothing they can have 
that is worth having; worth fighting for, 


86 FAITH IN CHRIST 


worth working for. They lack faith in 
the values of life. 

At the centre of the kingdom of every 
man’s mind is set up a throne, and on the 
throne sits a king, being the Thing-in- 
which-he-believes. If his homage is half- 
hearted his life will be inert, but if his 
homage is genuine he will live vigorously. 
And the manner of his life will depend, 
absolutely, on the character of that sover- 
eign seated, invisible but majestical, on 
the throne of his mind. 

He who believes primarily in the ma- 
terial is a materialist; in pleasure, a Syb- 
arite; in duty, a Puritan; in the develop- 
ment of his own character, a prig. “For 
where your treasure is, there will your 
heart be also.”’! 

The reader may protest that we all 
know better than we do; which may be 
true in a sense, or it may be merely a 
little phrase that we learned in Sunday- 
school, as Job says.?, We do indeed play 
false oftentimes to our convictions, and 
I shall have more to say later in regard 
to these inconsistencies, but we do not 
plunge off to right or left inconsequently, 

1 Matthew 6 : 21. *Job 12: 2%. 


CREED AND CONDUCT 87 


like a horse with blind staggers. What- 
ever path we take, we take it because at 
the end of it, or along the road, we see 
the promise of a reward which seems to 
us at the time most worth going after. 
When we refuse a particular course of 
action, we refuse it because the gain that 
it offers does not seem to us worth the 
price of the effort and renunciation which 
it involves. 

This does not mean that we choose our 
course in life after painstaking calcula- 
tion, deciding at last that the course on 
which we determine offers the highest 
satisfactions. On the contrary, we com- 
monly calculate very little, we do not 
stop to think, and our judgments are 
mostly of the surface. But, wise or foolish, 
superficial or profound, they are the only 
judgments we make, and in general we 
invest our lives in those enterprises which 
promise the most desirable returns. 

While the man who spends his evening 
in drunken dissipation may have a haunt- 
ing notion at the back of his head that 
he is a fool, nevertheless any alternative 
which suggests itself to him seems tame 
and uninteresting in comparison with the 


88 FAITH IN CHRIST 


excitements of the bar. Up to the point 
where disease paralyzes the will, up to 
the point, that is, of irresponsibility, of in- 
sanity, he chooses the saloon because he 
believes in it. 

In a little book of the memoirs of H. 
Page, published by the American Tract 
Society about seventy-five years ago and 
full of the peculiar piety of that remote 
age, occurs this extract from a _ letter: 
“Last Sabbath morning heard Rev. Mr. 
D., from ‘Let me die the death of the 
righteous, etc. His object was to prove 
that the impenitent sinners do not really 
wish the pure joys and employments of 
heaven, which he did most clearly.”” The 
writer does not tell us if this was offered 
as a consolation to the sinners or, other- 
wise, Just what was the purpose of the 
demonstration, but it is not difficult to 
believe that the preacher succeeded in 
proving his case. And he might still have 
proven it though the promised employ- 
ments had been less exclusively musical 
than in the heaven of 1838. The joys of 
a Puritan preacher could not be expected 
to appeal at once to the revellers at the 


a2 


inn, for their idea of a “good time” was 


ee ee ee ee ee ae = 


CREED AND CONDUCT 89 


entirely different from his. The life they 
were living was sufficient evidence of where 
to their mind the most alluring satisfac- 
tions were to be found. 

It is always entertaining to catch a 
man outside his busy hours and discuss 
‘“religion”’ with him. One finds that men 
do a good deal more thinking on such 
subjects as the word suggests than we 
commonly give them credit for. The 
day’s work done, they may find a subtle 
pleasure in pondering the great questions 
of the soul, the Supreme Being and the 
future life. The week’s work done, they 
may enjoy a church service with its fra- 
grant atmosphere and its outlook on large, 
far prospects. 

But our real religion is not what we 
think as we nestle by the evening lamp 
for an hour’s discussion, nor what we 
feel as the music of the anthem pours 
over our souls of a Sunday morning. Our 
religion begins with that of which we 
have just been speaking, with our con- 
ception of the meaning of life and life’s 
values; the things we are living for, what 
we wish to get out of life, what we wish 
to get done in life; with the question not 


90 FAITH IN CHRIST 
vy 


so much of how we are resolved to make 
our way, whether honestly or dishonestly, 
generously or ruthlessly, but of where we 
wish to arrive. 

It is true that people do not ordinarily 
imagine that this is the province of relig- 
ion. They have an idea that religion is 
a sort of umpire standing over the game 
insisting that it be played fair. On the 
contrary, it is little bothered about how 
the game is played; it assumes the right 
to a preliminary word as to what the 
game shall be. 

In his memorable lecture before the 
Bradford Board of Trade, John Ruskin said: 


You know that we are talking about the real, 
active, continual, national worship; that by which 
men act while they live; not that which they talk 
of when they die. Now, we have, indeed, a nom- 
inal religion, to which we pay tithes of property, 
and sevenths of time; but we have also a prac- 
tical and earnest religion, to which we devote 
nine-tenths of our property, and _ six-sevenths of 
our time. And we dispute a great deal about the 
nominal religion; but we are all unanimous about 
this practical one, of which I think you will admit 
that the ruling goddess may be best generally de- 
scribed as the Goddess of “Getting-on.” 1 


1 The Crown of Wild Olives: “ Traffic.” 


CREED AND CONDUCT 91 


And at the end of the lecture, after quot- 
ing some of Plato’s words about the idol 
of riches, he looked into the faces of those 
respectable, honest, churchgoing British 
merchants and charged: “This idol is 
yours.” ) 

It is not impossible that this idol is ours, 
too, ours when we do not in the least sus- 
pect that we are idolaters. And the danger 
is not peculiar to the very rich; they are 
too few to occupy much of our attention, 
and in any case I am not sure that they 
are the chief blasphemers at this shrine— 
more than most others they have had 
opportunity to learn that the shrine is a 
sham. But there are millions of others 
who worship afar, who see at a distance 
the golden flame and imagine that it is 
sacred fire with the magic of happiness 
in its burning; young men and young 
women whose dream is to “get on”: older 
men and women whose pride is that they 
have got on so well, or whose disappoint- 
ment and shame is that they have got on 
no better. 

The world is gradually doing away with 
its established state churches, but we still 
have our abundantly well-established state 


92 FAITH IN CHRIST 


religions. In seeking them it will serve 
little purpose to investigate the cathedrals 
and the theological seminaries; rather 
must one walk the streets, enter the homes, 
shops, factories, playhouses, legislatures, 
and, by observing how men live, discover 
what it is in which they really believe. 


IV 
LIFE’S COMPLEXITIES 


Ir it requires a prophet to reveal a new 
religion, scarcely less does it require a 
prophet to discover an old one. No in- 
quiry is more difficult than the attempt to 
penetrate the motives by which men live. 
In the preceding paragraph, for example, 
I did not mean anything so crude, and 
comforting, as to suggest that men are 
commonly engrossed in mere money-mak- 
ing; such an indictment would let us all 
out, for there are many things about 
which we care besides cold cash and its 
material products. 

But the mere fact that you love your 
wife, or that you are interested in old 
prints or golf or Foreign Missions, does 
not of itself absolve you from the charge 
of mammon-worship. The outright miser, 
such as I have lately described, is a pure 
figment of the imagination, as utterly 


mythical as the unicorn. The world has 
93 


94 FAITH IN CHRIST 


known, and knows to-day, many miserly 
men, but never a man whose character 
was exhausted in miserliness. The dram- 
atist could not portray such a man, for 
the picture would be so monstrous as to 
lose its human resemblance. Shylock 
passes for a miser; on the discovery of 
his daughter’s flight he could exclaim: 
“A diamond gone, cost me two thousand 
ducats in Frankfort.” But occasjon came 
when he exclaimed, even more pas- 
slonately: 


“Tf every ducat in six thousand ducats 
Were in six parts and every part a ducat, 
I would not have them; I would have my bond.” 


The conflicting passion saves the portrait 
to humanity; without it our Shylock 
would not be even the caricature of a 
man. 

Our ruling faith is never easily de- 
scribed. Like the princes of any reigning 
house, it is the proud possessor of a fine 
array of names, upon some one of which 
men will fasten for the sake of convenience, 
but no single word is ever fully expressive 
of a man’s character. 

And if human character as we actually 


LIFE’S COMPLEXITIES 95 


find it baffles us with its complexities, we 
become not less involved in complexities 
when we set out to describe character as 
it ought to be. Moralists condemn the 
love of riches and the craving for pleasure, 
but they surely do not mean that riches 
and pleasure have no real value and are 
not, within measure, proper objects of 
pursuit. The danger is that we shall set 
too much value on them; but how much 
is permissible? Who would ever hope 
to assess the various goods of life and to 
indicate precisely, or even approximately, 
the emphasis which should be placed on 
each? To what extent should a man be 
willing to subordinate wealth to charity, 
with the monks; or pleasure to piety, 
with the ascetics; or life to knowledge, 
with Browning’s Grammarian? How far 
should we sacrifice the welfare of our 
family to the interests of the nation, our 
own comfort to the comfort of the beggar 
at our door? 

These questions, with the whole array 
of questions which they suggest, are not 
to be answered satisfactorily in the ab- 
stract. But in the concrete, fortunately, 
they prove less difficult. We manage to 


96 FAITH IN CHRIST 


recognize virtue when we see it, as An- 
tony recognized Brutus: 


“the elements 
So mix’d in him that Nature might stand up 
And say to all the world, ‘This was a man!’ ” 


Christianity does not undertake the 
hopeless task of tabulating the multi- 
tudinous goods of life in such fashion as 
will be valid for all men at all times; it 
points you to a Man. There, we say, is 
the perfect life of humanity. . Learn to 
value things as he valued them; count it 
success when you achieve what he achieved, 
when you win what he won, when you 
become the man that he showed himself 
to be. And the true order of human values 
becomes intelligible to a child when it 
is thus embodied in a personality. 

Faith in Christ is nothing unless it be- 
gin with such a recognition of him as the 
only true and adequate revelation of human 
life, with the vision of him not only as 
supreme beauty but as the light of the world. 
But those who do thus believe in him, ac- 
cepting the valuations disclosed in his 
life, and sharing the faith that was in him, 
will find themselves at once not only Chris- 


~~ 


LIFE’S COMPLEXITIES 97 


tian but Christlike, actuated by the mo- 
tives which actuated him, his character 
becoming reincarnate in them. Christian 
faith does not so much produce Christian 
character; of itself it zs Christian char- 
acter. 


V 
FAITH AND CONVERSION 


Tue faith which determines a Chris- 
tian character, however, must be sharply 
distinguished from a mere amiable ad- 
miration of Christian virtues. 

To a certain degree, it is true, the adage 
holds good that “we become like that 
which we admire.” The man who ad- 
mires truthfulness, for example, will be 
truthful. If it is objected that every one 
admires truthfulness, the retort is ob- 
vious, that every one is truthful—up to 
the point where truthfulness interferes with 
the acquisition of some advantage on which 
he sets a still higher value. 

But it cannot be shown with the same 
simplicity that the man who admires gen- 
erosity will at once be gifted with a gen- 
erous soul. Paul tells us that he despised 
covetousness and fully recognized the wrong 
of it, but his stanchest resolutions were 
futile; he continued to do the thing he de- 


sired not to do; he was covetous in spite of 
98 


—_ ee =? 2 eae ei ee. on 


FAITH AND CONVERSION 99 


himself. And the reason is entirely plain: 
that generosity toward one’s neighbor 
is not born of a love of generosity, it is 
born only of a love of one’s neighbor. 
The heroism by which a man risks drown- 
ing to rescue a comrade does not spring 
from a desire to be a hero but from a desire 
to save his comrade’s life. 

Character indeed depends comparatively 
little on what a man wishes to be; almost 
entirely it depends on what he wishes to 
do, what he wishes to get and to give. 


“For what is this 
Thou thoughtest of thy prowess and thy sins? 
Thou hast not lost thyself to save thyself 
As Galahad.”’ ! 


Napoleon was fond of paying tribute to 
the beauty and power of Christ’s life, and 
we have no reason to suppose that his 
eulogies were not sincere. But Napoleon 
did not believe in Christ. Out in the 
wilderness of the temptation he would 
not have chosen as Christ chose; in the 
wilderness of his own life’s decision he did 
not, in fact, choose as Christ had chosen. 


1 The Holy Grail, Tennyson. 


100 FAITH IN CHRIST 


He preferred the kingdoms of this world 
and the glory of them. 

We accept the Pharisees as our arch- 
hypocrites, but there is one lowest depth 
of hypocrisy which the Pharisees never 
fathomed. In their rejection of Christ 
they were entirely frank. Much of what 
he said and symbolized was dark to them, 
but they sensed the meaning of his life 
clearly enough to know that to recognize 
him would imply a revolution in their 
whole attitude toward God and the world; 
in their religious system—Sabbath, sac- 
rifice, ceremonial, and the rest; in their 
political ambitions, aflame since time im- 
memorial with the hope of world-conquest; 
in their social organization, now comfort- 
ably adjusted for the benefit of the people 
on top. And the irrational expedient of 
acknowledging Jesus as the Christ, while 
still clinging to their old philosophy of 
life, apparently did not suggest itself to 
them. They: did not hail him as divine 
while they scouted his ideas as impractica- 
ble, nor did they call him the Lord of 
heaven while they murmured secretly that 
he was sadly lacking in his knowledge 
of business and politics. “‘Blind guides” 


—_ 
es eo - 


FAITH AND CONVERSION 101 


they may have been, but they were not 
too blind to see that the acceptance of 
him implied the remoulding of their lives 
in accordance with the revelation of his 
life, and they were not such utter hypo- 
crites that they ever sought to evade the 
implication. 

In his commanding presence I doubt 
not that the issue was too plain for any 
man to think of evading it, and if in later 
years we have stooped to hypocrisies of 
which the Pharisees themselves were in- 
capable, the reason, I am glad to believe, 
lies not in our deeper depravity but in 
this rather, that we have lost sight of the 
man Jesus behind the clouds of our spec- 
ulations and superstitions. 

Really to see Christ, is to see all life 
anew, and the acceptance of a new view 
of life involves a transformation of char- 
acter. “We all,” said Paul, “beholding 
as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, 
are transformed into the same image from 
glory to glory.’’! 

Such sudden changes of character as 
are here implied have been the object 
of no small amount of ridicule. ‘‘Con- 

1 TI Corinthians 3 : 18. 


102 FAITH IN CHRIST 


version,” says Leslie Stephens, “appears 
to me to be an absurdity ”’;! which is 
precisely the way I feel about chameleons 
—<TImpossible !—only I saw it’’; it is the 
way the king of Siam felt about ice. But 
in face of the facts one would do well to 
convince us that there are any changes of 
character which do not partake somewhat 
of the cataclysmic. “‘The soul’s advances,” 
Emerson wrote, “are not made by grada- 
tion, such as can be represented by motion 
in a straight line; but rather by ascension 


of state, such as can be represented by - 


metamorphosis—from the egg to the worm, 
from the worm to the fly.”? And his 
word, metamorphosis, significantly, is the 
noun form of the identical verb used by 
Paul in the passage just quoted. “‘We 
are metamorphosed,’ said Paul, “‘into the 
same image.” 

In the opening chapter of My Religion, 
Tolstoy gives us the following account of 
his own conversion: 


Five years ago I came to believe in Christ’s 
teaching, and my life suddenly became changed: 
I ceased desiring what I had wished before, and 


1 An Agnostic’s Apology, p. 363. 
2 The Over-Soul. 


aatitand—a Se, 


FAITH AND CONVERSION 103 


began to desire what I had not wished before. 
What formerly had seemed good to me appeared 
bad, and what had seemed bad, appeared good. 

The direction of my life, my desires became 
different: what was good and bad changed places. 
All this was due to the fact that I came to under- 
stand Christ’s teaching differently from what I 
had understood it before. 


This was a veritable and normal Christian 
experience. And we may say this without 
insisting that in every man the changes 
will be as dramatic and as easily described 
as with Tolstoy, for most of us do not 
begin as “nihilists.”1 And we may say it, 
moreover, without insisting that Tolstoy’s 
understanding of Christ and his teaching 
was then or ever complete. Enough that 
his new understanding was truer and fuller 
than the old, and the miracle happened. 


1 My Religion, p. 1. 


VI 
THE TRAVAIL OF REBIRTH 


TRANSFORMATION of character, however, 
as sudden and miraculous as it may be, 
is not easy; it is always hard. It implies 
in the first place the acquisition of a new 
idea, than which nothing is more difficult 
for our stubborn brains. 

Governments used to be cast into a 
frenzy of fear at the mention of free speech 
and a free press, accepting the familiar 
heresy of the fickleness of the mob, and 
imagining that if any mad fellow should 
begin to preach strange doctrines the multi- 
tudes would flock after him like sheep at 
the heels of the bell-wether, until in six 
months the nation would be abandoned to 
atheism and anarchy. But the desperate 
experiment has been foisted upon us and 
the multitudes have not yet run wild; 
they are at least no more revolutionary 
to-day than in the days of Wat Tyler and 
John Ball, when no man breathed his new 


creed under cover of darkness to a little 
104 


THE TRAVAIL OF REBIRTH 105 


group in the corner of a field without the . 
terror of the gallows before his eyes. 
Men sadly underestimated the resistant 
powers of the human mind when they im- 
agined that it would at once respond to the 
sorcery of fiery words, whether false or 
true. 

Look at the progress of the Reforma- 
tion, or the development of the principles 
of political democracy. Generation after 
generation great men arose, thundering 
the truth from the housetops in their 
effort to save men from the tyranny of 
priests and kings; and the priests and the 
kings took them, and tortured them, and 
burned them at the stake, and the multi- 
tudes thundered applause. The people de- 
voutly believed that they were made to 
be tyrannized over, and no eloquence on 
earth could persuade them to forfeit their 
subjection. 

Christ wished to give the world a new 
idea. We speak of his gentleness, and 
sometimes he was gentle; nothing could 
surpass the tenderness with which he dealt 
with criminals. But when he came to deal 
with respectable citizens who were in- 
clined to take satisfaction in the thought 


106 FAITH IN CHRIST 


that they were not criminals, who flat- 
tered themselves because they did not 
lie or steal or kill, and kept the Sabbath 
and went to church and provided for 
their families, then his language burned 
like lava. 

He challenged their supersacred Scrip- 
tures with his daring “But I say unto 
you,” trampling on the things they held 
holiest in the world—their elaborately 
phrased prayers, their carefully regulated 
Sabbath, their very home relationships; 
and worse than this he challenged their 
ordinary intelligence, flinging his epigrams 
in the face of their precious experience 
and their business sagacity. 

“Be not anxious for the morrow, what 
ye shall eat,” and did not every one know, 
then as now, the inevitable end of the 
spendthrift and the improvident! “Give 
to him that asketh thee,’ and how long 
would it be before they should all be re- 
duced to beggary! ‘‘ Whosoever _ shall 
smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him 
the other also,’ and so every honest man 
would fall prey to the murderous bandits 
of the highroad. 


It is not difficult to imagine the state 


THE TRAVAIL OF REBIRTH 107 


of mind of scholarly Pharisees at the close 
of such an address. They must have felt 
that they had been listening to a man of 
irresponsible speech who would have turned 
their well-ordered world into chaos. 

Such puzzling as this was perhaps in 
the mind of Nicodemus when he came to 
Christ by night. ‘“‘We know that thou 
art a teacher sent from God, for no man 
can do these miracles that thou doest ex- 
cept God be with him”’;* but these ex- 
travagances, these floutings of our Scrip- 
ture and our intelligence! What was it 
last ?—“If any man hate not his father 
and mother and wife and children, he 
cannot be my disciple.’? Now what are 
we to make of such insanity and impiety 
as this? And Christ answered the un- 
spoken question: “Ye must be born 
again,’ from the beginning ye must be 
made over, reconstruct the very presup- 
positions of your thinking and turn your 
moralities inside out. 

Despite the flippant assumptions of our 
popular-magazine theologians, Christ could 
not have meant that his maxims should 
be taken literally. ‘Be not therefore anx- 

1 John 3: 2. 2 Luke 14 : 26. 


108 FAITH IN CHRIST 


ious for the morrow,” but every one knows 
that we may not be too frivolous in our 
thought of the future; that if the farmer 
should fail to provide for the winter season 
he would not live through till the next 
harvest. It is the wisdom in us, not the 
folly, that bids us save, and the saving 
habit makes civilization possible; but also 
it may very easily make civilization not 
worth the having when we have got it. 
There is no insurance policy which will 
cover all the risks of the future, and which 
a man may buy at any price less than the 
price of his soul. 

“Tf any man hate not his father and 
mother and wife and children,’ I need 
not say that if any man did hate them he 
would be worse than the pagan, but how 
many men and women lose their souls in 
the narrowness of engrossing family af- 
fections, priding themselves on their de- 
votion while they are doing all in their - 
power to compass the ruin both of them- 
selves and of those they love! 

Christ spoke in strong, unguarded lan- 
guage, but he had to speak strongly, for 
he had to stir men’s minds to the depths 
of their most pious and commonplace as- 


THE TRAVAIL OF REBIRTH 109 


sumptions. He had to revise the ancient 
truisms of their morality and to upset the 
undebatable maxims of their common 
sense. 

In brief he had to change their religion, 
the most difficult of all tasks, for it means 
working in a material less malleable than 
granite, and not likely to yield at all to 
your moulding process except in the heat 
of tremendous emotions. A scholarly es- 
say on Christian ethics never yet recreated 
a human soul. If one is to make an im- 
pression on the inner nature of a man, 
there is needed a furnace of blazing pas- 
sion, and blazing passions are not wont 
to be nice in logical discriminations; they 
leave the necessary modifications to take 
care of themselves. 

It is as well, no doubt, and better, that 
the mind is not too easily impressed. It 
required eighteen hundred years of Chris- 
tian teaching for men to draw the ap- 
parently obvious inference that slavery 
is wrong; but, the inference at last drawn, 
we have the substantial consolation of 
knowing that it would require another 
eighteen hundred years to convince us 
to the contrary. Were it not for our stub- 


110 FAITH IN CHRIST 


born conservatism the moral battles would 
scarcely be worth fighting; their fruits 
would not last overnight. 

Blessed be the great, pervasive, in- 
finitely patient, infinitely wearisome power 
of inertia, whether it appear in the repose 
of pyramids, in the rush of planets, or in 
habits of act and thought. It is the thing 
that keeps most of us going most of the 
time and that holds us from going wrong. 
But woe to matter or man wherein are 
no more heroic forces playing their dis- 
concerting surprises, taking the dull-lived 
materials of dust and mind and exploding 
them into roses and larks and lyrics and 
revolutions; into wrestlings with Satan in 
the wilderness, Sermons on the Mount, 
and heart-breaking tragedies on the cross! 


vil 
FAITH’S LAPSES 


As we appreciate what faith really is 
we begin to find the reason for that sense 
of enfranchisement and harmony of soul 
which has typically characterized the 
Christian experience. 

As long as we get no further than to 
recognize Christ’s principles as morally 
imperative, seeing him as the mere person- 
ification of a purified Mosaic code, so long 
shall we find in him no freedom but only 
a more galling sense of restraint. Even 
if we realize that the shackles are for our 
good, we shall still feel ourselves shackled, 
hampered—to some degree handicapped in 
our pursuit of that which is our real goal 
in life. 

But when we see in Christ the only goal 
that is worth striving for, when the path 
that he blazed for us becomes the path of 
all delight and desire, leading at last to 
the delectable mountains of our own heart's 


satisfaction, the rigor of the law relaxes; 
111 


112 FAITH IN CHRIST 


that which before we did out of respect 
for the requirements of an external com- 
mandment, we now do out of the gladness 
of our own untrammelled choice. We 
feel, properly, that we have passed out 
from under the reign of law altogether, 
and have entered into a new kingdom of 
which the only law is liberty. 


““Duty’s a slave that keeps the keys, 

But Love, the master, goes in and out 

Of his goodly chambers with song and shout, 
Just as he please—just as he please.”’ ! 


This, I grant, is an account of the Chris- 
tian experience which is accurately true 
only of our most exalted moods, for the 
sorry fact presses on our attention that 
Christ’s followers, even the best of them, 
are not delivered from all. desires that 
conflict with the principles of his life. 
Very far do they fall short of any true 
reincarnation of his character. But it is 
only fair to observe that the failure of 
faith to produce its perfect fruit is by no 
means peculiar to the experience of the 
Christian. 

The first complexity of character, as 

? Dinah Maria Mulock Craik, Plighted. 


eee EE 


FAITH’S LAPSES 113 


we have noted, lies in the multiplicity of 
goods to which we all attach more or 
less value, but there is an added com- 
plexity: our scale of values is not only 
almost infinitely difficult to determine at 
any particular moment, it is also almost 
infinitely variable, from day to day, from 
hour to hour. 

By no chance is the royal sovereignty 
in this kingdom of the mind ever so firmly 
established but that the land is full of rival 
claimants for the throne. No South Amer- — 
ican republic has presented so tumultuous 
a succession of revolutions as does the 
individual history of every man. We 
are all in the throes of never-ending revolu- 
tionary struggles, and it is an unusually 
stable government in the politics of the 
soul which sees any twenty-four hours 
pass without several changes of dynasty. 

Watch your Shylock for a few evenings 
on his way home from business and you 
will see strange sights. Here he is, spend- 
ing an extra dime for a particularly ap- 
petizing cake at the baker’s, and here 
dropping one of his precious pennies into a 
blind man’s basket. Afterward he may 
repent of his extravagance or his generosity, 


114 FAITH IN CHRIST 


but as sure as he is a man you will find 
him occasionally out of character. At the 
instant when he squanders his substance 
on the baker’s tempting morsel he is an 
epicure, and when he drops his penny into 
the blind man’s basket, for the fraction of 
a second at least and to the measure of a 
penny’s worth, he is a Good Samaritan. 
Were he in his hovel alone and a mere 
impulse of generosity were to sweep over 


him, a loathing for the sordid stuff counted. 


out on the table before him and the thrill 
of a desire to use his gold to some noble 
purpose, for such time as the impulse 
lasted he would be in fact no miser but a 
philanthropist. 


“The thing we long for, that we are 
For one transcendent moment.” ! 


Browning’s whimsical counsel in A Soul’s 
Tragedy would have us carry the phi- 
losophy still further: 


Ever judge men by their professions! For 
though the bright moment of promising is but a 
moment and cannot be prolonged, yet, if sincere 
in its moment’s extravagant goodness, why, trust 


! Lowell, Longing. 


i a 


FAITH’S LAPSES 115 


it and know the man by it, I say—not by his per- 
formance; which is half the world’s work, inter- 
fere as the world needs must with its accidents 
and circumstances; the profession was purely the 
man’s own. 


These transcendent moments of extrav- 
agant goodness are entirely real and not 
to be lightly reckoned, evidence as they 
are at least of something within us better 
than that which we ordinarily exhibit to 
the world. Nevertheless, in simple fact, 
we refuse to know men by them, nor do 
we know men by their fits of sudden de- 
pravity. Rather by their calmer and more 
deliberate purposes we judge men. When 
a good man yields to a passing weakness, 
knowing that he will be sorry for it after- 
ward we readily forgive him. And when 
a consistently selfish man surprises us by 
an occasional act of generosity we hesitate 
to change our opinion of him too quickly, 
for he, too, may be sorry for it afterward. 
Indeed, his ardor may cool enough be- 
tween the first impulse and the execution 
of the act so that the gift shrinks while 
his hand is in his pocket, his actual con- 
tribution being but a fraction of what he 
originally intended, and as he walks on, 


116 FAITH IN CHRIST 


if he is really confirmed in his selfishness, 
he will berate himself for having yielded 
to a foolish sentiment. 

Not by his momentary impulses but by 
his dominant faith we judge a man, for 
good or evil. And this dominant faith 
we determine, in part by the general tenor 
of his life, in part by the reflections with 
which he afterward views his acts. If he 
be genuinely sorry for anything he has 
done we are ready with our forgiveness if 
the act was bad, and we must modify our 
approbation if the act was good. In one 
case as in the other we know that it did 
not represent the man. 

Those of us who accept Christ’s revela- 
tion of life have our moments of weakness, 
like others, sudden impulses in which for 
the instant our scheme of values is turned 
upside down; we also act “out of char- 
acter”’ on occasion. Only too well indeed 
we know how the moments of weakness 
lengthen, how true faith comes but in 
flashes; how dimly, even in our best mo- 
ments, we glimpse the vision of him through 
the mists of our passions and prejudices. 
But enough we discern to beckon us ever 
forward, so that, not counting ourselves 


FAITH’S LAPSES 117 


to have apprehended, but forgetting those 
things which are behind and _ reaching 
forth unto those things which are before, 
we press toward the mark for the prize 
of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus, 
in the hope of a day when we shall awake 
to find ourselves like him, for we shall 
see him even as he is. 

I do not mean that all inconsistencies 
in the lives of Christians are so comfort- 
ably to be apologized for. Many of them 
are due to a secret, fixed conviction that 
there are real values quite outside the 
range of Christ’s revelation, not rigorously 
in keeping with his principles and yet not 
lightly to be given up; which, of course, 
is not faith at all. In case of failure we 
have a right to look for that regret which 
inevitably accompanies the frustration of 
a serious purpose, for that penitence which 
is likewise inevitable when a man knows 
that the failure was due to his own fault. 
But given this genuine faith, marked most 
conspicuously by penitence in case of 
failure, we are accustomed to accept a 
man in the light of it. 

If that man’s ruling ambition is to heap 
up gold coins, if he subserves every other 


118 FAITH IN CHRIST 


desire to this paramount desire, regretting 
every action impelled by a conflicting 
motive, we say that the real man is the 
miser. And if this man’s sincere desire 
is to live the life that Christ lived, in like 
fashion we judge him, not by the vacil- 
lations of his actual life, but by the pur- 
poses on which he is seriously resolved. 
The real man for our appraisement is not 
the man we see, in his continual yielding 
to unchristian impulses, it is rather an- 
other man whom we never see, but half 
discern and half infer, behind the overt 
acts and beneath the transient impulses— 
the man he desires to be; his consciously 
and resolutely chosen, unattained and 
mayhap unattainable ideal. 

Old theologians used to speak, to the 
scandal of some of our modern moralists, 
of the “imputation” of Christ’s righteous- 
ness to the believer. And when the moral- 
ist asks how eternal justice can accept a 
man, not for what he is, but for what 
some one else is, the question seems to 
answer itself; but, as occasionally happens, 
the obvious answer is wrong. Whether 
eternal justice may make such a trans- 
position depends altogether on the relation 


FAITH’S LAPSES 119 


between the man and this “some one 
else.” In our friend’s penitence for his 
fault we say that he has “come to him- 
self,” and we do not feel that we are violat- 
ing any code of justice in accepting him 
at the worth of his calm and deliberate 
purposes. If then a man’s ruling faith 
be in Christ, his deliberate purpose to 
live the life that Christ lived, it is no more 
than a part of habit to accept him at the 
worth of that faith, of that purpose; to 
take him, not for what he is, but for what 
Christ is. On the ground of his faith in 
Christ we count the righteousness of 
Christ as his righteousness. 


Vill 
THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD 


Men frequently disparage attempts to 
“reduce” Christ to a ‘“‘mere example”’; 
and it is true that the meaning of his life 
is by no means exhausted in this office. 
But it is still the silliest of uncompre- 
hending folly to speak as if this phase of 
his ministry were relatively unimportant 
and inglorious. Are examples then so com- 
mon? Where else in the world, or in the 
history of the race, do we find any life- 
picture to which we dare, without reserva- 
tion, point the rising generation? 

We do homage to the masterpiece of 
marble in which a great sculptor has 
fashioned his ideal of the human form, and 
to the Madonna in which the painter has 
wrought on canvas his conception of true 
womanhood; we cherish the lines in which 
great poets and masters of prose have 
drawn imaginary portraits of heroic human 
character. To say of Jesus Christ that he 


is a veritable example for men, what is it 
120 


THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD 121 


but to say that here is a masterpiece of 
God’s workmanship, wherein he who carved 
the mountains and painted the sunsets and 
drew out the starlit scroll of the firmament, 
the infinite artist of the universe, has set 
forth his ideal of manhood; working, not 
in stone or colors or feeble words, but in 
the miracle-stuff of thinking mind, in that 
mysterious element beyond the reach of 
human hands, defying time, transcending 
space, a living soul? And all the genius of 
the earth, working not in substance but in 
dreams, has not been able to figure us 
another. 

There stands Christ, his life deeds re- 
corded, his picture painted. Look at him! 
Was he king of men, or no? Not that the 
Bible calls him perfect, that saints and 
heroes have united to do him honor, that 
teacher and preacher have held him before 
you as the pattern to be followed; for your- 
self, judge. 

His innocence, and whether we see it in 
him or in the little child who plays on our 
knee; his heroism, and whether we see 
it in him or in the crusaders of any age; 
his self-forgetfulness in the enthusiasm of 
a great cause, whether we see it in him or 


122 FAITH IN CHRIST 


in Livingstone or Lincoln; his militant 
integrity, his passionate tenderness, his 
democratic dignity, his joyousness, his seri- 
ousness, his reverence—those various qual- 
ities which go to make up the Christ-man, 
are they the true qualities of manhood, or 
not? The principles which we find so 
plainly exemplified in his life, are they, or 
are they not, the valid, unimpeachable 
eternal laws of our own being? 

To look at Christ is like looking at 
humanity through the rose-tinted glasses 
of all the fancies of the poets, of all the 
hopes and yearnings of the strongest men 
and noblest women; it is to see into our 
own hearts, in those hours when heaven 
seems nearest, with their struggles banished, 
their fleetingest golden dreams come true. 

Christ was not merely the supremely 
good man, he was the supreme Man; it 
is only in finding him that we find our- 
selves. 

In our acknowledgment of Christ as 
our divinely appointed example, human- 
ity’s archetype and ideal, deeper implica- 
tions are involved than men _ generally 
recognize. “The ideal, after all,’ said 
Amiel, “‘is truer than the real; for the ideal 


THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD 123 


is the imperishable element in perishable 
things; it is their type, their sum, their 
ratson @étre, their formula in the book of 
the Creator, and therefore at once the 
most exact and the most condensed ex- 
pression of them.” Or, in the language of 
Professor Palmer: “Ideals are merely reali- 
ties filled out. They express realities which 
have been begun but which have been 
left half-finished. More real therefore 
are well-constructed ideals, though less 
actual, than the realities themselves; for 
they set forth in full significance that 
which reality has been unable to attain.” ’ 

The ideal is ‘“‘truer than the real,” 
‘“more real than the realities”; the words 
are worth pondering. For, if Christ be 
indeed the ideal of humanity, may we not 
believe that perfect wisdom sees in us all, 
underneath the cloak of our follies and sins, 
the perfect image of Christ—unformed, 
embryonic, distorted, but still there? Rea- 
son enough that God should cherish us! 
A thoughtless gratitude has sometimes 
said that God loves men, not for anything 
worthy that he finds in them, but for the 
mere reason that he is love; forgetting 


1 The Problem of Freedom, p. 125. 


124 FAITH IN CHRIST 


that this would be to make God a moral 
monster, for what is immorality but the 
love of the unlovely? Men credit the wife 
who clings to her husband in his downfall 
with the miracle of a devotion which finds 
nothing in its object to fasten on; but the 
wife knows better; beneath the rags she 
still has eyes to see the beauty which lies 
mysteriously concealed. And so must God 
be able to see in every man the promise of 
better things, of the best things, however 
blind and ready to condemn we men may be. 

For there is no man in whom this Christ- 
ideal is not struggling for realization, tragi- 
cally free though we are to disown it if we 
will; there is no man indeed, even of those 
who have disowned it, in whom it is not in 
some part realized, who in some of. his 
moods and relations does not betray his 
kinship with the Master-Soul. And if in 
other moods and relations we crush and 
Suppress it, inevitably shall we be bur- 
dened, if not with such a sense of conflict as 
that which weighed on the sensitive soul of 
Paul, at least with a vague sense of longing 
and dissatisfaction. The feverish pursuit 
of excitement, in dissipation, frivolous plea- 
sures, and the rest, that we find among 


THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD 125 


men is evidence of nothing else than that 
the soul is denied its proper life. No one 
of us can ever be content with the hum- 
drum and the commonplace; we are all 
hungry for the infinite. The rich man is 
not satisfied with his riches, nor the drunk- 
ard with his drafts; feed ourselves as 
we will on the cheap sensations of wealth 
or stimulants, of games or travel or art, 
and the soul still cries for more. 

Within us is a half-finished image, and 
the creative energies of the universe are 
pushing for its completion. Of a sudden 
we see Christ, and there is no mystery in 
the quick, spontaneous response of our 
nature. There, and there alone, we be- 
hold the promise of satisfaction, of self- 
realization. We have been with our souls 
as with a disconsolate child, begging and 
begging, clamorously, piteously, but in a 
language we did not understand; til now, 
in Christ’s presence, the long mystery 
becomes plain. In him, for the first time, 
the true, full meaning of every human life 
is made known. 


Faith in Christ means then, first, the 
acceptance of a new ideal, which is not 


126 FAITH IN CHRIST 


merely a new conception of character, 
but a new realization of the meaning and 
purpose of life, a new sense of life’s values, 
a new definition of success; and this not 
merely one ideal, out of many, that we 
happen to choose for ourselves, but the 
ideal, for which we were evolved, which 
is nascent in the soul of every man, and 
only in the light of which all humanity 
becomes intelligible. 

The sincerity with which we accept it 
is precisely measured by the penitence 
with which we look back on the deeds and 
endeavors of our former life under the 
dominance of other ideals. For Christ’s 
call to men, that they should “repent and 
believe,” implies no sequence of time; 
the two, faith and repentance, are as simul- 
taneous as the shaft of light and the shadow 
which it casts. A man cannot begin to feel 
sorrow for his sins, in distinction from a 
mere chagrin at) the sins’ penalties, until 
the sins are conquered; until in embracing 
a new ideal he has actually achieved a new 
manhood. 

Therefore was Lincoln as true to life as 
he was true to Scripture when he said, in 
the course of a conversation reported by 


THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD 127 


Carpenter the painter: ‘““When a man is 
sincerely penitent for his misdeeds, and 
gives satisfactory evidence of the same, he 
can safely be pardoned, and there is no 
exception to this rule.” 


III 
THE SON OF GOD 


I 
THE ECCENTRICITIES OF DOUBT 


As long as I speak of Christ as the reve- 
lation of human life, the pre-eminent, ideal, 
complete man, I seem to speak in plati- 
tudes, but when I turn to speak of him 
as the revelation of divine life, God in the 
flesh, I am likely to challenge scepticism. 
At last, men exclaim, we have entered upon 
the battle-ground. All the eulogiums that 
rhetoric can devise in praise of his human- 
ity they are willing to grant; it is not here 
that the issue lies. 

On the contrary, I am inclined to believe 
that it is here the real issue does lie. It is 
true that men generally recognize Christ’s 
life to be higher and better than their own, 
admitting that they ought to live in accor- 
dance with his principles. But we are not 
concerned with oughts and laws, we are 


concerned with faith. And does our ob- 
128 


THE ECCENTRICITIES OF DOUBT 129 


servation indicate, on the part of men in 
general, a calm and determined confidence 
in Christ’s valuations? Or is the life of 
the multitudes mainly regulated by a 
trust in things on which he set a very low 
value or no value whatever? Christ’s 
revelation of human life is a truism which 
is very commonly discredited. 

But his revelation of divine life, toward 
which we assume such a learned air of 
incredulity, is one of the axioms of our 
thought. When men think of God to-day, 
they think of him ordinarily as they see 
him reflected in the face of Jesus of Naza- 
reth. 

The significance of our current theolog- 
ical conceptions is to be appreciated only 
in connection with the history of the 
past, and past conceptions are necessarily 
hard to reconstruct. But a casual study of 
our Old Testament documents will reveal 
startling glimpses of the crude notions of 
Deity entertained even among the ancient 
Hebrews. After David had been driven 
into exile from Saul’s court, we are told 
that he stole into the royal camp by night 
and took from the king’s side a spear and 
a cruse of water, after which he is reported 


130 FAITH IN CHRIST 


as saying to the king: “If it be the Lord 
that hath stirred thee up against me, let 
him accept an offering. But if it be the 
children of men, cursed be they before the 
Lord; for they have driven me out this day 
that I should not cleave unto the inheri- 
tance of the Lord, saying, Go serve other 
_ gods.” ' These men, Israelites, evidently 
supposed that in sending David beyond 
the bounds of Israel they were sending him 
beyond the sovereignty of Israel’s God—a 
supposition which David apparently shared. 

The idea may seem shocking to some of 
us that David should have failed to recog- 
nize the universality of God’s rule, think- 
ing of him as God of Israel alone, his 
dominion limited to the hills that banked 
the Jordan valley, bounded by the dominion 
of other gods outside. But we need not 
be shocked; it was Elijah, more than a 
century afterward, who first shook the land 
with the thunder of the declaration: ‘‘The 
Lord, he is God; the Lord, he is God.” 
And Elijah’s name has lived down through 
the years for the very reason that in the 
discovery of this truth he was a pioneer, 
that through him Israel began to awaken 

1T Samuel 26 : 19. 


THE ECCENTRICITIES OF DOUBT = 131 


to the great lesson that one God reigns 
supreme in heaven and on earth and that 
the gods of the heathen are naught. 

Or consider the other clause in David’s 
address to the king: “If it be the Lord 
that hath stirred thee up against me, let 
him accept an offering.” Such was David’s 
method of propitiation; no word of re- 
pentance or of any change of life; the 
smell of an offering was to transform the 
divine frown to a smile. It seems strange 
to find in the greatest of Israel’s kings so 
utter a dependence on ritual and sacrifice, 
with such utter negligence of God’s primary 
demand for right living. It seems strange 
until we remember the work of Amos and 
his immediate successors, whose contribu- 
tion to the religious thought of the nation 
was in this very disclosure of God’s char- 
acter, his inherent righteousness and the 
consequent necessity, and sufficiency, of 
righteousness to secure his favor. 

Not that the earlier prophets had omitted 
all mention of morality, but as we read 
the ancient codes we are constantly im- 
pressed by the meagre space given to moral 
laws in comparison with that given to the 
multiplied regulations of the ceremonial. 


132 FAITH IN CHRIST 


With the literary prophets the emphasis 
changes. “Wash you, make you clean,” 
cries Isaiah, and the cleanness is no longer 
the ceremonial purity of priestly ablutions, 
but “put away the evil of your doings from 
before mine eyes; cease to do evil; learn 
to do well; seek justice, relieve the op- 
pressed.”’! 

The history of the people of Israel is 
the story of a nation groping after God, 
and the glory of that history les in the 
manner in which, little by little, under the 
leadership of great men, light broke upon 
the darkness. 

The history of other nations of antiquity 
differs in this, that for them the light did 
not break. The whole world was covered 
with temples and smoking altars and tribes 
of priests; soldiers refused to go into 
battle until the sacrifices had been offered; 
cattle were slaughtered by the thousand; 
men slashed themselves with cruel instru- 
ments and banished themselves from human 
society in a pitiable effort to secure an 
answer to their prayers; mothers laid their 
children on the altar and watched while 
the priest plunged a knife into the warm 
flesh—there is no doubt that men thought 

1 Isaiah 1 : 16 f. 


+ ——————————— 


THE ECCENTRICITIES OF DOUBT 133 


of God, and felt their need of him, and were 
willing to pay for his help and favor. 
But what did they know of him? 

A god in every spring and mountain, 
each envious of the other’s power; a god 
that descended on the world at night to 
abet men in their crimes; that delighted 
in the smell of burning bullocks, demanding 
the blood of little children for his offerings; 
that spoke through the ravings of maniacs; 
that knew the future but did not know 
right from wrong; fitful, deceptive, venge- 
ful, ruthless—it is all so far behind us 
that we can scarcely credit the fidelity 
of the picture; the world to-day has 
another thought of God. 

And where did the world learn its lesson ? 
We shall not forget the great sages of 
paganism and the inspired vision with 
which they caught splendid glimpses of 
the truth; but in simple fact the world 
did not see the light through their revela- 
tions. Especially we shall not forget the 
prophets of old Israel; but the world did 
not see the light through the eyes of 
Israel’s prophets. These pioneers of the 
truth rose and fell; the torch which they 
lit flickered on, but it never shone far be- 
yond the land where it was first kindled. 


134 FAITH IN CHRIST 


Most of their own countrymen even still 
groped in semidarkness, and at the close 
of the prophetic period the light rather 
waned than brightened. The masses in 
Israel came to think of God as a heavenly 
tyrant, not lacking in benevolence, but 
mainly interested in the workings of an 
intricate and meaningless code of petty — 
laws. 

Then, suddenly, came Christ! The Jews 
in the main disowned him, but the elabo- 
rate regulations of Pharisaism fell into 
decay. Greece and Rome received the 
first tidings of him with derision, but the 
gods of Greece and Rome became empty 
names. The story of his life swept over 
the earth and before it, like darkness be- 
fore the dawn, old, distorted conceptions 
of deity faded and vanished. Thereafter 
men might reject all idea of God if they 
would, but if they wished a God at all 
their conception must be framed after this 
new image. From that day until now, 
when men have set out to describe God 
they have portrayed the character of Jesus 
Christ. ‘‘He that hath seen me,” he said, 
“hath seen the Father.’’’ 

1 John 14: 9. 


| II 
THE MADNESS OF ATHEISM 


But, after all, it may be asked, why the 
theologizing? If we believe in Christ as 
the exponent of human life, accepting his 
assessment of life’s values and endeavoring 
to follow him, what difference does it make 
whether we be theists or polytheists, or 
whether we abandon the thought of God 
altogether ? 

It really makes a considerable difference. 

We talk glibly of the values of life, but 
if there be no God, there are no values. No 
single part of the universe can have a 
meaning unless the whole has a meaning, 
for though life with its problems may 
transcend Euclid’s axioms, it surely can- 
not contradict them. 

Here are a thousand workmen—masons, 
carpenters, painters, sculptors, and hod- 
carriers—all busy plying the various instru- 
ments of their trades, a mass of materials 
piled up about them. “Why so ener- 
getic?” Tinquire. ‘‘ What are you doing?” 

135 


136 FAITH IN CHRIST 


“Carving a stone,” says one, “Planing a 
board,” says another, and “Carrying 
bricks,’ answers a third. ‘“‘But what is 
it all about? What are you all domg?” 
“Building,” they answer. “And building 
what?) !YNothing. a so¥ our “mean, aa 
urge, “‘that the plans are secret.” “We 
mean nothing of the kind,” protest the 
workmen; ‘“‘it is our deliberate belief that 
there are no plans, that there is no archi- 
tect; the whole enterprise has no  pur- 
pose of any sort; if ever the structure were 
to be completed it would be of no use; 
it is neither factory nor cathedral; we 
spend our lives building—nothing !”’ 

Then I beg leave to remark that they are 
working too hard. 

The problem as to whether or not life 
is worth living is not to be solved by a 
nice balancing of the pleasures of life 
against the pains—where are the scales 
for such a calculation? If human life 
in the large has a purpose, to the accom- 
plishment of which we may contribute, each 
soul may conceivably find a meaning 
and a value in substantial service; but if 
the cosmos itself is aimless, then is the life 
of every individual left void and inane. 


THE MADNESS OF ATHEISM 137 


Instinctively men believe in the values 
of life as real—the child is ever an optimist. 
Instinctively, that is, they believe that the 
universe has a meaning and a purpose; 
they believe in God. The reason they are 
as ready as they sometimes are to dismiss 
God from their philosophy is that all the 
while they take him for granted in their 
life: 

Such an inner contradiction, however, 
is not likely to endure permanently. An 
intuitive faith unsupported by conscious 
philosophy is much in the position of green- 
backs with no gold in the treasury. They 
may pass current for a time, but soon or 
late the fraud is bound to be discovered, 
whereupon depreciation will quickly follow. 

It is worth the world’s while occasionally 
to take stock of its intellectual convictions. 

Atheism would seem to me a plausible 
hypothesis but for one circumstance— 
that we have the universe on our hands. 
If it were not for the universe I can imagine 
that atheism might be widely prevalent; 
atheism, that is, in the sense of an absence 
of belief in God. And it is undoubtedly 
true, moreover, that the further our knowl- 
edge extends, the more incredible the 


138 FAITH IN CHRIST 


universe seems, with its incomprehensible 
distances and its equally incomprehensible 
littlenesses, its amazing metamorphoses, 
its organizations of suns and women’s 
clubs and ants and ions and_ proto- 
plasmic cells, its tangle of waves, in the 
air and the ether, which may be anything 
from a sunset or a sonata or a lightning- 
bolt to the draft-horses of a trolley-car 
or a planet. It is all monstrously un- 
thinkable if you will, but it zs. “In the 
beginning God created the heavens and 
the earth’’; well, at least, there flame the 
heavens and here swings the earth, we are 
sure of them. If we could doubt the reality 
of earth and sky, we might succeed in 
making a very substantial structure of our 
negations, but we have not laid one stone 
on another till, crash! the universe is 
upon us, thrusting its lights before our 
eyes, roaring in our ears, tripping up our 
feet. | 

Men used to be fond of saying that, the 
universe being here, we must give some 
account of its origin; where it came from 
and how it managed to get started. They 
argued that there must have been a God 
in the beginning to set the machinery in 


THE MADNESS OF ATHEISM 139 


motion, and they have been much dis- 
turbed by the theory of evolution for fear 
it was going to make God unnecessary. 
But the fact is, that there was no need 
to wait for the theory of evolution to re- 
turn the easy answer which the argument 
invited; namely, that there had been no 
beginning, that our material universe has 
itself existed from all eternity. 

The real mystery is not in the past but 
in the present. That which concerns us 
is not what occurred six thousand or sixty 
million years ago, it is the thing before us; 
above us and beneath us and around us and 
within us. For the universe is not dead, 
it is alive; pulsing, dancing, pounding, rush- 
ing, grasping, struggling, in every atom and 
every imponderable boulder of a world. 
From sun and planet invisible hands reach 
out in a clasp stronger than iron. Winter 
brings its sleep over the far hills, but we 
know that the ground waits only for the 
breath of spring to run green again. All 
about us we see, not the dry bones of a 
valley of death, but motion, development, 
the sweep of splendid energies, the play of 
stupendous forces. 

-Now, it was just these forces, so evident 


140 FAITH IN CHRIST 


in their manifestations, themselves unseen 
and inexplicable, that primitive peoples 
endowed with the attributes of personality 
and called gods. And if our definition of 
divinity has changed with the years, it is 
only as our view of things in general has 
changed. 

Very early in history men began to 
suspect that these various forces, alike of 
nature and of human nature, cannot be 
too definitely distinguished one from the 
other, but are somehow tied up together, 
that there is a mysterious unity beneath 
the welter of diversity which the sun dis- 
closes. Elijah, his predecessors and_ suc- 
cessors were not only the great original 
prophets of religion, they were the great 
original prophets of science. They de- 
scried: the universe—no mean _ achieve- 
ment! Thousands of years before physi- 
cists began to talk of theories of matter and 
the interconvertibility of the forms of 
energy, before Madame Curie discovered 
the atoms flying to pieces in her laboratory, 
or Sir William Ramsay caught the elements 
in the very process of transformation, 
these men divined a suggestion of the truth 
that about us is no mere congeries of unre- 


THE MADNESS OF ATHEISM 141 


lated forces and materials, but an organ- 
ism, with an inner, final simplicity of being. 
It was at once the boldest and most im- 
posingly significant hypothesis which the © 
mind of man ever conceived. Every dis- 
covery since made in any of the sciences 
has tended to confirm it, and to-day we 
ean think in no other terms; without it 
our modern scientist might as well throw 
away his text-books and _test-tubes and 
go out to play. The old multiplicity of 
things and forces has become for us organ- 
ized, unified, one! And it is this central 
Source of all being and energy, this “uni- 
versal principle of life,” the “Great Organ- 
izer,” ! as Professor Soddy calls it from the 
standpoint of the scientist, which from the 
standpoint of religion we call God. 

I have spoken of men denying God alto- 
gether, but in a sense there is no denying 
him; at most we can refuse to grant him 
any intelligent will, any conscious pur- 
pose, without which attributes we ordinarily 
withhold the sacred name. It may be 
that this Great Organizer of which scien- 
tists talk is a merely physical thing, with- 
out memory or foresight, without mind 
_1 Matter and Energy, by Frederick Soddy, M.A., F.R.S., p. 194. 


142 FAITH IN CHRIST 


or heart; a tremendous, ruthless, witless 
energy, pushing the worlds on in their 
courses, grinding out here a verdure-swept 
earth, and there a lifeless moon, dewfalls 
and tornadoes, serpents and thrushes, itself 
meanwhile unconscious, unreasoning, and 
emotionless. But whether blind and dumb, 
or quick with intelligence and emotion, 
there can be no question but that the forces 
are there. 

We cannot deny the universe, and we 
cannot deny that it 7s a universe, one and 
not many—or one as well as many. We 
cannot deny the great Fountain of energy 
and life which is at the heart of it, 
swinging the planets as if they were no 
more than _billiard-balls, moulding the 
earth stuff into intricate forms of tree and 
flower, begetting now a king beast of the 
jungles, and now a Plato, or a Shakespeare 
—or a Christ. 


Il 
THE CHARACTER OF GOD 


Tue existence of this first principle of 
life, the Great Organizer, will not meet 
wide dissent among thoughtful men. “The 
fool hath said in his heart, There is no 
God,” said the Psalmist, and we have 
generally assumed that he was deriding 
the atheist; on the contrary, he was 
merely giving us the scientific definition 
of a fool. This is what a fool is: a man 
who does not believe in God, who fails 
to recognize the relation between cause and 
effect, who sows a crop of tares expecting 
to reap a harvest of grain. He goes on 
the assumption that this is a helter-skelter, 
crazy, headless world, whereupon the world 
at once decides that it is he who lacks a 
head. 

Our crucial question is as to what kind 
of a being God is. Is he—or is it—merely 
a vast kernel of blind forces begetting 
worlds and destroying them, with no 
knowledge of whether he makes or mars? 


Is he a heartless Moloch who knows but 
143 


144 FAITH IN CHRIST 


does not care? Or is he this other Being, 
conceived under the image of Christ, worthy 
of a man’s reverence and love? 

For our answer we shall seek the heav- 
ens and the material earth in vain. John 
Fiske characterized as one of the two silliest 
‘sayings ever appearing in print the French 
astronomer’s remark: “I have swept the 
heavens with my glass and found no 
God.” For if the astronomer meant that 
among the stars he saw no prodigious and 
magnificently ordered energies, obviously 
his remark was silly, since we all can see the 
blazing evidence of such energies without 
the aid of glasses. Or if he meant, as he 
doubtless did mean, that among the stars 
he saw no conscious mind and no love- 
warm heart, his remark was still silly, 
for it is not among the stars that a sane 
man looks for mind and heart. | 

Did a child, perhaps, sometimes interrupt 
the famous astronomer while he worked, 
begging for permission to peep up through 
the wonderful instrument? And did the 
astronomer brush him aside impatiently, 
hardly waiting to explain that he was 
busy, searching the cold skies for some sign 
of intelligence and tenderness? Throw 


THE CHARACTER OF GOD 145 


your telescope to the scrap-heap, Lalande; 
while your eyes are scanning the far heavens 
for the trace of a god, God himself is tug- 
ging at your coat sleeve. 

A strange perversity of the human in- 
tellect it is, that when we begin to discuss 
the divine nature we must send our minds 
back millions of years to the world’s be- 
ginnings, or out millions of miles to the 
world’s end. 


‘Does the fish soar to find the ocean, 
The eagle plunge to find the air— 

That we ask of the stars in motion 
If they have rumor of thee there? 


Not where the wheeling systems darken, 
And our benumbed conceiving soars !— 

The drift of pinions, would we harken, 
Beats at our own clay-shuttered doors.” ! 


In regard to the great, outlying universe, 
as Laplace, Lalande’s greater contemporary, 
said with his dying breath: ‘‘ What we know 
is little, what we do not know is immense.” 
But there is one tiny section of the universe 
about which our knowledge is less severely 
circumscribed. We have a little world of 
our own, each one, including our relations » 

1 Francis Thompson, In No Strange Land. 


146 FAITH IN CHRIST 


with the men about us, with our friends, 
with our children; and there, what are 
the laws written in nature, in owr nature; 
what are the principles of life as we find 
them in ourselves? 

We may sweep the heavens with our 
glass and find no evidence that nature 
cares for anything except that the planets 
do not veer from their appointed courses; 
but we cannot look down into our own 
hearts without seeing evidence of a higher 
concern, we cannot listen to the voice of 
conscience without knowing that the forces 
which sent ws forth on our career make 
demands upon us that fall quite outside 
the range of mathematics. 

It is no blind leap of faith we make when, 
looking at Christ, we see in him the “ex- 
press image”’ of the person of God. While 
the scientists have been surveying the 
physical universe and interpreting God in 
terms of the’ laws they have discovered 
there, laws of physical energy and _ life 
force; we have interpreted God in terms 
of the laws we have found in our own 
nature, laws of moral consciousness. And 
our procedure is surely not less legitimate 
than that of the scientists, as our acquain- 


THE CHARACTER OF GOD 147 


tance with the suns is not more intimate and 
assured than our knowledge of ourselves. 

In Christ we find something more than 
a superlatively admirable man, we find 
our imperative ideal. Whatever the power 
that launched us on the earth, the demand 
of that power is, that we should be like 
Christ. If then God’s law is that men 
should be Christlike, what manner of being 
must he himself be? ‘“‘He who made the 
ear,’ asks the Psalmist, “shall he not 
hear? he who made the eye, shall he not 
see?”?! The argument of the Christian 
is more compelling: “‘He who ordains 
righteousness, is he not righteous? He who 
demands love among his children, is he not 
a God of love?” 

Our knowledge of the character of God 
can come in no other way than through 
such an inquiry into the laws by which 
he operates. Even if he should break into 
articulate speech and, in thunder tones 
and perfectly good English, himself testify 
to us of his justice and kindness, we could 
accept the testimony only so far as it 
accorded with the principles by which we 
see him working. 

1 Psalms 94 : 9. 


148 FAITH IN CHRIST 


But, men protest, here is the very 
point of difficulty; granted that in the con- 
science of his creatures he has written 
these statutes of righteousness, his own 
conduct shows no such Puritanical control; 
he is like a factory owner who holds him- 
self superior to the restraints with which 
he surrounds his workers. We look about 
us and see no principles of love and jus- 
tice in the government of the world. 
Everywhere we find the good dishonored, 
and the bad enthroned; the prizes of life 
lavished on the self-seeking and the un- 
scrupulous, the generous and the brave 
afflicted and unrewarded. 

So we judge superficially, but is the 
world in fact as morally topsyturvy as 
it seems ? 


“Speak, History! Who are life’s victors? Unroll 

the long annals and say, 

Are they those whom the world calls the victors, 
who won the success of a day? 

The martyrs, or Nero? The Spartans who fell 
at Thermopyle’s tryst, 

Or the Persians and Xerxes? His judges, or 
Socrates? Pilate, or Christ?” # 


These questions scarcely admit of two 
1 William Wetmore Story, Io Victis. 


THE CHARACTER OF GOD 149 


answers when they are once asked and 
frankly faced. Undoubtedly the issue 1s 
often disguised; enough promise of reward 
glitters along the false way so that the 
right way makes a call on our heroism, 
tests us out to know whether the right 
purpose is sincere; but all the conquest is 
with the man who chooses truth and the 
high enterprise, the final victory is forever 
with the man who follows Christ. 

Such is the kind of universe we live in; 
which, after all, is only another way of 
saying that such is the kind of God who 
rules over us. The great Soul of the 
world is just and not unjust, love and not 
hate. 

The Christian finds in Christ the perfect 
expression of the law of his own being; 
therefore he finds in Christ, necessarily, 
the perfect expression of God. His mind 
leaps from one to the other, from Christ 
as the ideal of humanity to Christ as the 
revelation of divinity, inevitably and imme- 
diately; if there is any logic involved in 
the process he is wholly unconscious of 
it. Rather does it break upon him with 
all the directness and certitude of an 
intuition; ‘‘Flesh and blood hath not 


150 FAITH IN CHRIST 


revealed this unto thee, but my Father 
who is in heaven.” ! 


Notr.—We shall not, of course, think of God as identified 
with the universe, his life confined to the instruments of its mani- 
festation, for our conclusion that he is intelligence and love, a 
spirit, necessarily involves his transcendence, as the human soul 
transcends the body and its physical energies. This familiar 
analogy, however, of the relation between human soul and body, 
as an explanation of the relation between God and the universe, 
must not be pushed too far. Unless we are to abandon all idea 
of an ultimate unity in reality, we must think of the existence 
of the universe as grounded in God as the body of man does not 
exist in the soul. 

In view of recent pluralistic tendencies in philosophy, I may 
seem to have taken this underlying unity too lightly for granted, 
but a crass pluralism seems to me unthinkable. Even Professor 
James insisted that “our ‘multiverse’ is still a ‘universe’ ” 
(A Pluralistic Universe, p. 325), and though he specifically 
grounded his unity in relations rather than in essence, he yet 
said, of his pluralism: “Provided you grant some separation 
among things, some tremor of independence, some free play of 
parts on one another, some real novelty or chance, however 
minute, she is amply satisfied, and will allow you any amount, 
however great, of real unity” (Pragmatism, p. 161). The real 
object of his attack was pantheism, with its determinism and its 
submergence of individuality. Bergson has sometimes been 
ranked as a pluralist, but a more discriminating criticism rec- 
ognizes that “his philosophy may be said to be in reality an ap- 
peal from a shallower to a deeper form of unity” (H. C. Corrance, 
“‘Bergson’s Philosophy and the Idea of God,” Hibbert Journal, 
January, 1914. Quoted by Miller in Bergson and Religion, 
p. 108). 


1 Matthew 16: 17. 


IV 
SIGNS 


Ir a man fail to find in Christ his impera- 
tive moral ideal, it is quite hopeless to 
think of persuading him, as indeed it would 
be quite profitless to succeed in persuading 
him, to accept Christ’s revelation of God. 

No man believes in the divinity of Christ 
because of his belief, for example, in the 
virgin birth. Having already recognized 
Christ’s divinity, we may then find in the 
mystery of his birth what seems to us a 
reasonable explanation of his unique char- 
acter. We may even insist that it is the 
only possible explanation, and one is at 
liberty to bolster this position with such 
arguments as can be found; but meanwhile 
we must in all fairness remember that 
there are many who regard the birth story 
as legendary, while their faith in Christ 
as the Son of God is, in simple fact, un- 
shaken. 

And no one, nowadays at least, believes 


in the divinity of Christ because of the 
151 


152 FAITH IN CHRIST 


evidence of the miracles. We need not 
hope to convince any man of the credibility 
of a miracle wrought nineteen hundred 
years ago unless in the beginning we con- 
vince him of something altogether extraor- 
dinary in the personality of the miracle- 
worker; we must convince him of the 
divinity first. Christ himself showed slight 
confidence in miracles as evidence of his 
authority, even for the immediate specta- 
tors; refusing more than once to work 
“signs, rebuking those who asked for 
them, and regularly enjoining silence on 
the sick whom he had healed. 

For those who appreciate the character 
of Christ, his supremacy in the spiritual 
world, it will not be difficult, I think, to 
accept the possibility of “miracles” at 
his hand. Our knowledge is far too lim- 
ited for us to attempt to bound the power 
of the spiritual over the material, or to 
determine the extent to which we our- 
selves may lay hold on the power of God. 
Every voluntary movement of the human 
body is an example of the control of the 
material by the spiritual; we never raise 
a hand or frame a word but we appropriate 
divine energies for the fulfilment of our 


SIGNS 153 


purposes, and Christ’s evident spiritual 
superiority makes it by no means in- 
credible that his activities should have 
transcended our experience. Whatever 
their evidential value, in any case the 
miracles are our wholesome reminder that 
there are a number of things still beyond 
our foot-rule philosophies. 

Some good people have insisted on the 
miracles, I fear, not only as a sign of Christ’s 
divinity but as an evidence of God’s power; 
which means only that they have forgotten 
for the moment, as people will forget, who 
Godis. For no evidence can ever be needed 
of God’s power; he zs power, all the power 
there is; our quest for him has been nothing 
else than a searching for the source of 
all energy, burning in the furnaces of the 
suns, pulsing in passion through the march- 
ing multitudes of men. Look out at the 
sea in a storm, at the planets bowling 
through measureless space, and you will 
need no incident of a miracle to prove that 
God is strong. 


V 
POPULAR THEOLOGY 


THERE is no such thing as rejecting 
Christ’s ethics while retaining his theol- 
ogy; nor is there any such thing as reject- 
ing his theology while retaining his ethics; 
the two stand or fall together. In all 
logic and reason, that is, they stand or 
fall together, but, happily or unhappily, 
vast numbers of men are serenely eman- 
cipated from the shackles of logic and 
reason. I have already contended that 
many men find in Christ their revelation 
of God who refuse to accept him as their 
ideal of human life, and the solution of 
the difficulty is really not far to seek. 
They achieve this apparent impossibility 
by the simple ‘device of a disguised and 
unconscious polytheism. 

I suppose there has never been more 
than one outright monotheist among men 
—Christ himself; with Cesar Borgia, per- 
haps, as his nearest second. Borgia wor- 


shipped a god of crime and cruelty, but 
154 


POPULAR THEOLOGY 155 


if we are to believe the chroniclers he was 
at least consistent, and would have said, 
“Thou fool,” to the self-sacrificing Christ 
with a contempt as sincere as the pity 
with which Christ would have said, “Thou 
fool,” to him. 

But most of us do not think of Christ 
as in any sense a fool. On the contrary, 
we recognize his life as the highest and 
best life possible to humanity. Merely, 
we feel that for us there are other values 
with the promise of more satisfaction than 
the values which he discloses. We assume 
the existence of two worlds; one peopled 
by saints and good women and very small 
children, over which God reigns and in 
which he distributes rewards appropriate 
to the inhabitants; and another peopled 
by ordinary folk like ourselves, to whom 
the precious rewards of the saints are not 
attractive, and with whose daily affairs 
God has very little concern. 

This common world is not ruled by a 
God of love; its laws are not those of ser- 
vice and sacrifice, but of self-aggression; 
here the man who seeks his life finds it, 
and he who finds keeps; here each must 
take first thought for himself, and the 


156 FAITH IN CHRIST 


Golden Rule is, that “To do the best for 
yourself, is finally to do the best for 
others.” 

Now, if a man believed that the entire 
universe were conducted on this principle 
of rigorous selfishness, he would be a per- 
fectly logical monotheist, whose god was 
Moloch. But no one does so_ believe. 
We do not hold that Christ would have 
been the wiser if he had counted the cost 
to himself and declined the cross; we do 
not think the martyrs ill-advised in refus- 
ing to recant; we do not despise the mother 
because she denies herself for the sake of 
her children. More than this, we grant 
that the law of love holds for all people, 
in some circumstances; no one but keeps 
some little garden of his life sacred to 
sentiment. But for most men the great 
working fields of life are handed over to 
the reign of a very businesslike, “‘practical”’ 
god, who has so little in common with the 
precepts of the gospel that ordinarily he 
is not called God at all. 

When Ruskin speaks of our “nominal”’ 
religion in distinction from our real relig- 
ion, he does not mean, I think, that the 

* Ruskin, The Crown of Wild Olive: Traffic. 


POPULAR THEOLOGY 157 


former is merely nominal. In that case 
men would not devote to it even the one- 
seventh and the one-tenth. It is real in 
its sphere, but its sphere is limited. It 
divides the field with another, dominant 
religion which threatens its existence, but 
stops short of annihilation. 

Such polytheism is, of course, utterly 
irrational and for a man who thinks, 
impossible; but most of us do not think, 
preferring to build our lives on contra- 
dictions. And even so we never succeed 
in keeping the two spheres entirely separate. 
The God of love, the God of our Bible and 
our children and our circle of friends, of 
our day of sickness and our hour of death, 
always reaches over into the other’s terri- 
tory with at least certain imperative nega- 
tions; even in a business deal we must not 
lie, or cheat, or bear too hard on the man 
in our power. And the god of this prac- 
tical, business world reaches also into the 
Other’s territory, gradually robbing the 
church of its vitality and the home of its 
sweetness, sapping the vigor of good-will 
from the clasp of friendship, making of 
sickness a comfortless anguish, and of 
death a looming horror. 


158 FAITH IN CHRIST 


But though the two spheres thus en- 
croach on one another, we still act on the 
assumption of their virtual independence. 
We recognize the laws of life as revealed 
in the life of Christ as valid—in their 
place. We have to learn only, after twenty- 
five hundred years, that “The Lord he is 
God, there is none else”; that “Ye can- 
not serve God and mammon.” 


| VI 
THE IMAGE OF THE INVISIBLE 


I HAVE spoken of the difference between 
the scientific and the religious approach 
to the discovery of God’s nature. I do 
not mean to suggest, however, that science’ 
has had no part in the development of 
theology. On the contrary, it has been the 
very greatness of its revelations that has 
embarrassed us and overwhelmed us and 
on occasion swept us into something like 
atheism. 

Science never makes a discovery in any 
department by which the horizon is thrust 
outward and the universe is revealed as 
richer in its materials, its forces, and its 
laws, but that, automatically, our con- 
ception of God is likewise enlarged and 
enriched. And our theology does not 
always stand the strain of these sudden 
expansions. 

The sixteenth century had a very definite 
idea of God as a kindly and righteous 


Monarch, dwelling in an abode of light 
159 


160 FAITH IN CHRIST 


not far above the blue vault of the firma- 
ment. Galileo pierced that vault with his 
glass, and found no God—the remark 
would not have been silly in the sixteenth 
century. Gradually, before men’s eyes, the 
universe expanded to ten thousand times its 
former dimensions. The propelling Energy 
of the worlds was revealed as incommensu- 
rately vaster than men had before dreamed, 
or could have dreamed. And this new 
Power which loomed before them, reaching 
through the dizzy abyss of swinging suns, 
they could not at once endow with the 
friendly, hearth-fire attributes of their God 
of yesterday, who from a finite heaven 
looked down upon a finite earth. 

I shall not be the first to blame the 
man of science who dared to accept the 
new-found truth at the loss of his old faith; 
and neither shall I be the first to blame 
the man of religion who clung to his 
faith in the desperate conviction that 
somehow the strange, new instrument must 
lie. 

The prophets of old Israel must have 
seemed to the masses of the people little 
better than atheists. Those poor little, 
primitive conceptions of a tribal deity, 


THE IMAGE OF THE INVISIBLE 161 


with his dwelling-place on Horeb, had 
the unquestionable merit of providing a 
God with whom men were on speaking 
terms, before whom they could bring their 
offerings, and to whom they could pray. 
But how far above human fellowship must, 
at first, have seemed the bewildering Be- 
ing of the prophetic proclamations—Lord 
of the whole earth, sovereign alike in Israel 
and Edom and Egypt, and far off Baby- 
lon, his head among the stars, his feet 
stalking the mountains and the seas! 

And many men to-day, perhaps most 
men, have to re-enact something of this 
racial experience. That the young phi- 
losopher inclines to atheism may be due 
not so much to the shallowness of his 
thinking, as Bacon suggests, but rather 
to the very truth of it. He has beaten 
his way into a larger universe and we 
must give him time to make the necessary 
adjustments. 

Our ponderous modern arguments that 
an infinite being cannot be personal are 
but an echo of the unreasoning logic of 
the multitudes through all the generations. 
Such has always been the problem; to 
retain the old personal attributes in con- 


162 FAITH IN CHRIST 


nection with the growing universe and its 
God. The common sense of mankind 
recognized the difficulty and bowed before 
it, long before philosophy knew there was 
any problem to be met; and when at last 
philosophy has solved the riddle to its 
entire satisfaction, the solution will no 
doubt be found to be a restatement of 
the solution by which, in crisis after crisis 
of the development of human knowledge, 
the faith of mankind has emerged trium- 
phant from its momentary dilemma. 

Some inordinately reverential folk insist 
that it is unworthy of God’s divinity to 
endow him with personality, thereby 
representing him as a magnified man; 
whereupon they proceed to vindicate his 
dignity by depriving him of mind and will, 
representing him as sheer force, a mag- 
nified teakettle. It is difficult for me to 
believe that we are offering an affront, 
either to divinity or reason, in thinking of 
the Soul of the universe as endowed with 
intelligence and affection and purpose. If 
personality imply something other than 
this, we can afford to eliminate the word. 

If any man protest that it is difficult to 
visualize such an all-pervading conscious- 


THE IMAGE OF THE INVISIBLE 163 


ness, I freely grant the difficulty. There 
was an old tradition among the Hebrews— 
freighted, as tradition not seldom is, with 
more philosophy than most of the phi- 
losophies—that a man cannot look upon 
the face of God and live. But we look 
upon the face of Christ and are possessed 
by the confidence that we are gazing upon 
“the image of the invisible,”! in whom 
““dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead 
bodily.” 2 

For some adequate knowledge of the 
Power that reigns behind the far-spread 
curtain of the heavens, within the mys- 
terious mechanisms of nature and history, 
the Spring of all energies, the Dispenser 
of all destinies, the people of earth had 
been seeking since humanity’s dawn. How 
little had the wise men of any land guessed 
that they would one day find him revealed, 
not in any blazing prodigy of the skies, 
but in a Galilean carpenter! Yet, by a 
quick flash of insight, or an inspiration of 
hidden reasoning, the world leaped to the 
conviction that he was at last disclosed 
as the Father of this soul. 

Peter knew nothing of our elaborate 


1 Colossians 1 : 15. 2 Idem 2: 9. 


164 FAITH IN CHRIST 


creeds and theologies, but in response to 
the Master’s question, ““Whom say ye 
that I am?” the answer burst from his 
lips, ‘‘Thou art the Christ, the Son of the 
living God”’;! and the peculiar significance 
of that answer was, not that Peter had 
found Christ, but that he had found God. 


1 Matthew 16 : 16. 


WOOT 
THE HOLY SPIRIT 


I 
GOD IN THE SOUL 


OrtHopox Christian theology has al- 
ways shown a strangely active aversion 
to pantheism; as if we were in imminent 
danger of plunging headlong into the in- 
finite, losing our souls in the absolute. 
And I confess that I have little sympathy 
with the pantheist’s heaven; his delight 
in the thought of it seems to me a per- 
version, like the old toper’s dream of drown- 
ing in champagne. I have no wish to be 
drovned, even in divinity. 

Moreover, for. a man to confuse his 
identity with God’s must have unfortunate 
consequences. Especially, it relieves him 
from the fear of making a mistake, after 
which he is not only an uncomfortable 
companion, but an undesirable citizen. 

But, happily, we of the West are gener- 


ally immune from the dangers of a panthe- 
165 


166 FAITH IN CHRIST 


istic philosophy; for philosophy, when it 
turns pantheist, makes gods of us all, while 
the true Occidental never does this; at 
most he makes a god of himself, leaving 
the rest of us to the orthodox frailties of 
our humanity. 

The real danger for our thinking is not 
lest we bring God too near to us, but lest 
we set him too far away. By definition, 
he is the basis of all being, the source of 
all energy; it is precisely for the Soul of 
the universe that we have been seeking all 
the centuries; and surely the long search 
will profit us little if, as at last it leads us 
to him, we proceed to set him apart from 
the universe we have been endeavoring to 
explain. To what purpose shall we affirm 
that God is good if we are then to deny that 
he is God? | 

Yet such is the capital error to which 
Western thought inveterately tends. And 
our aberration is wrapped up with the 
fundamental problem of all metaphysics; 
this, namely: if God is in and through 
all the universe, mountains and men alike, 
if “in him we live and move and have 
our being,”! where then is there room 

1 Acts 17 : 28. 


GOD IN THE SOUL 167 


for the autonomy of any human soul? 
While the East has tended to solve the 
problem, simply, by denying that man has 
any autonomy, the way of pantheism; the 
West has tended to solve it, with equal 
simplicity, by denying man’s dependence 
on God, the way of deism. And in each 
case the negative violates the plain facts 
of experience; for, as we risk intellectual 
suicide when we begin to question the 
unity of the universe, so we have too 
much evidence within consciousness itself 
to question the individuality of the human 
soul. 

Our ignorance is much vaster than our 
knowledge, but these two facts we know, if 
we know anything—harmonize them as 
one may—that as far as we live at all, we 
live in God, as dependent on him as the 
splash of light on yonder wall is dependent 
on the burning sun; and that, withal, 
we are mysteriously free to choose and act 
for ourselves, even to cut ourselves off 
from his fellowship and to defy his will. 
The two facts may look at each other 
askance, but we at once find ourselves 
in trouble when we look askance at either 
of them. 


168 FAITH IN CHRIST 


The problem of the relation of God to 
the world becomes most enigmatical in 
connection with the existence of evil. How 
can evil exist in a world in which, as Paul 
says, “there is no power but of God,’’! 
if God be wholly good? The question 
sounds formidable, but our realization that 
it is a part of the larger, unsolved problem 
we have been considering ought to warn 
us not to be too facile with our conclusions. 
For the practical purposes of religion I am 
inclined to think we can be content with the 
simple, negative proposition that the evil, 
somehow, does not exist as evil in the 
will of God. Beyond this, it may safely 
be said that the highest apparent pur- 
pose of creation, in the development of 
moral personalities, would be inconceivable 
without the possibility of an effective choice 
between right-doing and wrong - doing; 
and there may:even be a ray of truth in 
the contention of Browning and the Chris- 
tian Scientists, that “‘The evil is null, is 
naught, is silence implying sound”; the 
mere absence of good, as darkness is the 
absence of light. This theory has plausi- 
bility and will do no harm unless we are 


1Romans 13: 1. 


GOD IN THE SOUL 169 


tempted by it to underrate the forces 
arrayed against us. Any man will fare 
ill in life’s contest who imagines that, 
because evil has been reduced to a meta- 
physical negation, therefore he has no 
real battle to fight. A vacuum is uncom- 
promisingly negative, but we shall still do 
well not to get caught in it. Whatever 
their true standing in the universe, the 
forces of evil assail the soul, as the forces 
of disease assail the body, with all the 
Savageness of a positive and prodigious 
reality. 

No mystery, however, attaches to the 
existence of good in the world. Of it we 
know both the source and the ground of its 
being. All wisdom, righteousness, love, 
joy, has its spring in God not only, but it 
continually exists as part of the vast cur- 
rent of divine energy. 

In the beginning it was God’s very 
breath which breathed into this human 
frame of ours the gift of life, and still 
every breath we draw is of the divine life, 
alike in the physical atmosphere of crisp 
winter air and perfume-laden summer 
breeze, and in the moral atmosphere of the 
world’s kindness and truth and love of right. 


170 FAITH IN CHRIST 


“Dig down far enough in any man,” said 
Augustine, “and you will find the divine,” 
for the good that lingers in the worst of 
men is a reminder of their high spiritual 
lineage, a spark of that primeval fire in 
which all life consists. And when through 
the ashes of our selfishness and lusts the 
spark bursts into flame, it is the very life 
of God that has conquered in the life of 
man. 

Only once in the vast drama of human 
history has the divine life found full expres- 
sion on the earth. In the character of 
Christ the disciples descried a gleaming 
reflection of the character of God, “the 
effulgence of his glory and the very image 
of his substance.”! And they were not 
so ingeniously stupid as to think of him 
as a little flesh and blood model of Infinity, 
representing and revealing God as the re- 
duction in the museum represents the 
Parthenon. The old poets of Israel had 
seen the shining of the very glory of God in 
the refulgent heavens, and now these new 
poets of the soul saw God in Christ. His 
smile was to them but a completer mani- 
festation of the beauty which they saw in 

1 Hebrews 1 : 3. 


GOD IN THE SOUL 171 


the stars and the flowers, the music of his 
voice a more consummate embodiment of 
the melody which they heard in the song 
of the birds and in the wind among the 
trees; the power by which he opened blind 
eyes was to them God’s power; the wisdom 
that filled his words, God’s wisdom; the 
love that thrilled and—too exquisite for 
the poor human chords to endure—at 
last broke his heart, the very love of God. 

God it was whom men had been seeking 
through all the years, “if haply they might 
feel after him and find him,” “not far 
from any one of us” and yet concealed by 
the very vastness of his revelation; and it 
was God whom now they had found, the 
very essence of his being incarnate in 
Christ. 

And then, behold! a miracle. They dis- 
covered that a transmutation had come 
upon their own lives; they found the 
character of Christ, in some part at least, 
reproduced in themselves. Up to a cer- 
tain noonday Paul had been of one nature, 
but from that moment he realized that he 
was of a totally different nature. He saw, 
moreover, that that which had happened 
to him had happened also to the earlier 


172 FAITH IN CHRIST 


disciples, and he believed that the experi- 
ence was open to all men—Jew and Gentile 
alike. In this confidence he went out to 
persuade the race-proud Greeks and the 
lords of Rome to find their revelation of 
God in the life of a Galilean workman. 
And as he went, lo! for a man here, and 
for a score or a thousand there, the cloud 
of despair that had darkened the world 
parted. Behind him he left a trail of song. 
Idol-worshippers cast away their idols, 
and along with their idols they cast away 
their old sensuous pleasures, their old 
practices of untruth and dishonor. Every- 
where he found himself face to face with 
transformed, “‘converted”’ men. 

“Ye must be born again,’ Christ had 
said, and the teacher in Israel had won- 
dered what he meant; but to the disciples 
there was now no mystery in the saying. 
The man they, had been was dead, and 
they had arisen to find themselves changed; 
animated, literally, by a new spirit, that 
very spirit of wisdom and might, and 
_ reverence and love, which Isaiah and all 
the prophets with him had ever identified 
with the Spirit of God.! 


1[saiah 11:23; cf. Acts 2: 16 f. 


GOD IN THE SOUL 173 


“For who among men,’ Paul asks, 
“knoweth the things of a man, save the 
spirit of the man, which is in him? even 
so the things of God none knoweth, save 
the Spirit of God. ‘But we received, not 
the spirit of the world, but the spirit 
which is from God. ... For who hath 
known the mind of the Lord, that he 
should instruct him? But we have the 
mind of Christ.’! Identification of the 
life of man with the infinite life of God 
could scarcely go further; so far did Paul 
feel that he and his fellows were permeated 
by the divine life that they could actually 
read God’s thoughts from the inside, as a 
man reads the thoughts of his own heart. 

These men of the early Church spoke 
of themselves familiarly as “‘saints,’’ holy 
men; even of their bodies it was said, 
“For the temple of the Lord is holy, and 
such are ye.” 

When Paul came to Ephesus on his 
third missionary journey he found a little 
group of men who already professed to 
be Christians, but on the part of the Ephe- 
sian Jews in general there was a very 
confused notion of the teachings of Christ, 

1] Corinthians 2: 11 ff. 


174 FAITH IN CHRIST 


with only the vaguest conception of the 
cleavage between the old religion and the 
new, and ‘the question at once arose in 
Paul’s mind, Had these men really under- 
gone a vital Christian experience? The 
apostle did not conduct an examination as 
to their knowledge of the doctrine of the 
atonement or of Justification by faith; 
“Have ye received the Holy Ghost?” he 
asked. “‘We have not so much as heard,” 
they said, “whether there be any Holy 
Ghost,” and the answer seemed to Paul 
sufficient evidence that they had not yet 
been fully admitted to membership in the 
household of Christ.! 

If Paul should make his appearance in 
our modern Church he would find no such 
ignorance, for we have all received our 
theological instruction in the doctrine of 
the Trinity. But, after all the centuries 
of controversy ‘and definition and _ nice 
discriminations, if he should insist on 
pressing his critical question, “‘Have ye 
received the Holy Ghost?” I fear some 
of us might falter in our answer. There 
are a good many minds for which the Holy 
Ghost has been banished to a vague dwell- 

‘Acts 19 : 1 ff. 


GOD IN THE SOUL 175 


ing-place among the clouds, or reduced to 
a mathematical abstraction. 

But for Paul and his companions the 
Holy Spirit was no abstraction; they had 
discovered it not in logic, but in life, in 
an experience which to them seemed other- 
wise unaccountable. The miracle has been 
in progress now for almost two thousand 
years, and it no longer astonishes us, 
seems, indeed, quite a part of nature; 
but in the beginning they sensed the real 
wonder of it: that a man, or a thousand 
men, could be instantaneously re-created; 
affections, interests, motives, relations, all 
suddenly changed. 

They were not afraid to say that they 
saw God incarnate in men. And for us 
the Holy Spirit must fade into a mere 
absurdity of theological dogmatics, except 
as we also see it, active and potent, in the 
reborn spirits of the men and women about 
us; as we conceive it, not as something 
apart from men, an influence acting on 
us from without, but as itself the inner, 
actuating principle of our renewed impulses 
and chastened desires; ‘‘so united to the 
faculties of the soul,” as Jonathan Edwards ° 
wrote, “that he becomes there a_prin- 


176 FAITH IN CHRIST 


ciple or spring of new nature and life”; ! 
a new spirit which has taken possession 
of the very citadel of the mind, replacinz 
the old, generating in us a “new man... 
after the image of him that created him,” 2 
so that we are no longer impelled by an 
earthly spirit of darkness and evil, but by 
a spirit of holiness, the divine Spirit of 
light and love. 

xa a former chapter I spoke of the travail 
by which a man must attain to the vision 
of Christ and to the accomplishment of 
the Christian ideal. The endeavor would 
be quite hopeless but for this; that the good 
in us is the omnipotent God in us, that the 
Christ ideal carries in itself all the energy 
of the infinite. Literally, while you “work 
out your own salvation with fear and trem- 
bling, . . . it is God who worketh in you 
both to will and to work, for his good 
pleasure.” ? 

It is not surprising that Christian the- 
ology has shown an active aversion to 
pantheism, for while it has appreciated the 
calamity involved in pantheistic philosophy, 
it has yet seemed to preach pantheism. 


1 Religious Affections, part III. * Colossians 3 : 10. 
* Philippians 2 : 12 f. 


GOD IN THE SOUL 177 


In the treatise from which I have just 
quoted, Edwards seems in one instance 
actually to have frightened himself by the 
explicitness of his language. After say- 
ing that the life of Christ is not conveyed 
into the believers “‘as the sap of a tree 
may be conveyed into a vessel, but is 
conveyed as sap is from a tree into one of 
its living branches,” he draws the conclu- 
sion that our gift of the Holy Spirit con- 
stitutes a real “participation of God”; 
whereupon, with suspicious violence, he 
at once turns to say: ““Not that the saints 
are made partakers of the essence of God, 
and so are godded with God, and christed 
with Christ, according to the abominable 
and blasphemous language and notions 
of some heretics.’ We shall agree that 
the language he imputes to his heretics 
is, perhaps, blasphemous, and surely abom- 
inable, but their notions do not seem so 
clearly distinguishable from his. He would 
have us believe that the divine life flows 
into us as the sap flows into one of the 
living branches of the tree, so that we 
have a “participation of God,’ but he 
holds us no better than atheists if we be- 
heve that we are made “partakers”’ of 


178 FAITH IN CHRIST 


the divine “‘essence”! The reader may be 
pardoned for feeling that, with the black 
gulf of heresy yawning on either hand, he 
is left balanced, precariously, on nothing. 
Nevertheless, the distinction which Ed- 
wards drew is not to be dismissed lightly. 
He was trying to depict a vital union be- 
tween the finite and the infinite, which 
should yet not involve absorption, and 
his language failed him for the good rea- 
son that he was ranging at heights where 
human knowledge fails. The truth is that 
we do not know the real relation between 
any two things in the wide universe, except 
such things as we ourselves unite—the 
button and the coat, or the wheels within 
one of our mechanisms. We know nothing 
whatever of the essential nature of the 
links that bind atom to atom, or the earth 
to the sun, that hold our own feet on the 
earth, or that’ unite spirit and matter in 
the human anatomy; we do not know the 
inner connection between trunk and branch, 
seed and stalk, father and child here among 
men; we do not know what spirit is, or 
what life is, or what matter is. There is 
really a very great deal that we do not 
know, and it is the merest presumption in 


GOD IN THE SOUL 179 


us to pretend to expound the subtleties 
and distinctions of the relations which sub- 
sist between Christ and the Father, be- 
tween man and God. 

But we do know that the relations exist; 
that, while still retaining our individual 
identity, we are dependent for our very 
existence on him who is the ground of all 
being. We know, moreover, that as the 
good conquers in us we share more and 
more fully in the divine life, but that with 
this, paradoxically, our own individuality is 
not diminished, but intensified. The long, 
bitter, and, to many, apparently senseless 
Trinitarian controversies have been more 
than anything else a conflict to maintain 
this paradox; to maintain it on the one 
hand against the logic of the pantheist 
who would smother man in the Absolute, 
and on the other against the logic of the 
old-fashioned Unitarian deist who would 
banish God from his universe and leave us 
stranded in a world without a soul. 


II 
THE UNITY OF THE SPIRIT 


TurovuGcH the gift of the Spirit, Chris- 
tians have thus recognized a bond of 
mystic but real union between the human 
soul and God; and through the same gift 
they have recognized a bond of mystic 
but real union among human souls them- 
selves. ‘‘ That they may be one,” Christ 
prayed, ‘‘even as we are one; I in them, 
and thou in me, that they may be per- 
fected in one.”! “In one Spirit,”’ said Paul, 
*“‘were we all baptized into one body.”’? 

The doctrine of the unity of the Spirit, 
like that of the Holy Spirit itself, was no 
product of speculation; it, too, was the 
statement of a fact of experience. 

From the beginning, the differences which 
had divided the world up to the coming of 
Christ, Jew and Greek, rich and poor, bond 
and free, faded from the minds of the Chris- 
tian company. The young disciples, of 
whatever race or social station or degree 
of culture, felt themselves drawn together 


1 John 17 : 23. 2] Corinthians 12 : 13. 
180 


THE UNITY OF THE SPIRIT 18] 


not only as friends, but as a family, an 
organism; for the establishment of the 
Church did not rest on any arbitrary 
decree, it was spontaneous and inevitable. 
Caught up by the flood of the common life 
which surged through them, they gathered, 
not in order to found a Church, but be- 
cause the Church was already there, de- 
manding expression in organization and 
assemblies and common tasks. 

The Church grew as naturally and at 
the same time, so far as our knowledge 
goes, aS mysteriously as the flower grows. 
All these leaves and petals and branchlets, 
pick them off one by one and each is a 
thing by itself; and yet, as they grow 
there, each is not a thing by itself; all 
together they constitute one plant, organ- 
ized into unity by the familiar but utterly 
mysterious power which we call life. Such 
was Christ’s figure of the: vine, in which 
he depicted the unity of his followers with 
himself and with one another. And to 
like effect Paul used the figure of the body 
with its many members. 

Churchgoing is not merely a respectable, 
plous, and more or less useful custom; it 
springs out of the very instincts of the 


182 FAITH IN CHRIST 


Christian faith. So far as we are possessed 
by the Spirit which links us with the 
Eternal, so far are we indissolubly linked 
with every other man who shares that 
Spirit; participating in the fellowship of a 
common life; concerned not only for one 
another’s welfare, but actually finding our 
highest satisfaction in the abundance of 
the common good, feeling the pinch of our 
brother’s need and the exhilaration of his 
joy. 

The last phrase of the Apostolic Benedic- 
tion is our continual reminder of this great 
truth. In invoking “‘the communion of 
the Holy Ghost,” Paul did not intend that 
his readers were to have fellowship with 
the Spirit—the New Testament makes’ 
no mention of prayer or worship addressed 
to the Holy Spirit—but that through the 
common blessing of the Spirit they were 
to enjoy a living communion with one 
another. 

Here it is that the paradox of diversity 
intensified in unity becomes most apparent. 
“Human progress,” said Herbert Spencer, 
“is toward greater mutual dependence, as 
well as toward greater individuation.” * 

1 Social Statics, chap. XXX, § 14. 


THE UNITY OF THE SPIRIT 183 


As we merge our life in the life of the mul- 
titude, our own souls are not impoverished 
but immeasurably enriched. The super- 
man of modern prophecy, a being superior 
to sympathy, too self-contained to respond 
to the spiritual currents of the crowd, 
too supremely great to care what others 
think or suffer, is really a product of the 
nightmare of a moral indigestion; far from 
having the soul of a god, he has not the soul 
of an ant. That alone which saves him 
from utter condemnation is that he does 
not exist, nor ever can; for every man 
has within him some elements of the divine, 
and these elements are in their very nature 
forces which reach out and lnk him, 
inseparably, with his kind. God zs love, 
and the more fully any human soul par- 
takes of the divine life, the wider and 
deeper are the relations in which it finds 
itself bound to the great spiritual world 
in which it lives. 


Il 
GOD IN SOCIETY 


Tue divine Spirit welds into unity all 
those who share it; and, conversely also, 
whenever and wherever any bond of union 
is found among men, there we may know 
the Holy Spirit is at work. 

Every united company of men, every 
partnership and union and social group, 
is In some sense a divine thing. Unright- 
eousness, selfishness, in any form, never yet 
held any two men together, and never 
can; it acts always as a tremendous, cen- 
trifugal force driving men apart. Nothing 
can hold men together except love, except 
God. 

It is true that men often combine for 
evil ends. The Church itself has fre- 
quently been used as a mere instrument of 
commercial gain and political oppression. 
And this is our deepest shame, that we 
prostitute our very divinity. The first 
divine gift to the individual is freedom, 


and we so turn this freedom into lawless 
184 


GOD IN SOCIETY 185 


license that the very beasts of the jungle 
are guilty of no such deliberate savagery, 
no such unnatural degeneracy, as men at 
their worst. And this first of divine gifts 
to society, the capacity for union, we like- 
wise turn to a curse. Men in companies 
commit outrages to which as individuals 
they would not stoop. They must gather 
in a mob in order to burn a negro at the 
stake; they must form a corporation or a 
labor union to teach us the full horrors 
of a bloodless commercialism. 

Nevertheless, even though men be united 
for some wholly selfish and unrighteous 
cause, it is yet through the good in them, 
not the evil, that the union is made possible. 
If there were not some honor among thieves, 
we should have no gangs of ruffians, our 
marauders would always come singly. Only 
a century or so ago one of'the greatest of 
English economists prophesied that the 
corporations would never grow to large 
proportions, and he based his forecast on 
the inherent selfishness of human nature; 
for these great industrial combinations, with 
all their crimes, could not exist were it not 
for the cohesive force of certain fine quali- 
ties in men: mutual faith, with the honesty 


186 FAITH IN CHRIST 


on which that faith is based, and the will- 
ingness to share both loss and gain. 

Educators in the East have found diffi- 
culty in developing Western games among 
their students, for the reason that every 
boy’s ambition is wholly concerned with 
his own achievements, the youngsters hav- 
ing no idea of team-play or team-victories. 
To those Eastern students, and perhaps 
scarcely less so to our own, the athletic 
game becomes a real means of Christian 
grace. Whatever helps us merge our own 
interests in the interests of a larger group, 
plays its part, large or small, in ushering 
in that unity of the race which is the final 
purpose of God’s Spirit in the world. 

From time immemorial marriage has 
been solemnized with religious rites, because 
men have instinctively recognized the 
sanctity of the bond that binds husband 
to wife, parent to child. In the home 
was the first altar set up; all other altars 
have been kindled, and kindled again, 
from its flame; and if its fires are ever 
allowed to die out, then must every other 
sacred fire in the world go black. 

I do not know what price the nations 
must yet pay for the houses into which they 


GOD IN SOCIETY 187 


have huddled so many millions of their 
people, hovels in which the divine spark 
is so easily smothered, but it is certain 
they shall pay in full. The rentals of 
cheap tenements are not really low, they 
are only deferred. In the old supersti- 
tious days men used to be afraid to lay 
desecrating hands on any sacred thing 
for fear God would strike them dead for the 
sacrilege. And the fear was not altogether 
a superstition; such is still the inevitable 
judgment—no _ swilt lightning-stroke, but 
death, nevertheless, sure and inexorable 
as fate. And the home is a sacred thing. 

Popular thought has regarded the nation 
also as under a peculiar divine protection. 
Men have always found it easy to say, 
“Bor God, for home, and for country,” 
linking the three in a sort of trinity. Until 
recent years the idea of separating Church 
and State had hardly occurred to men’s 
minds, and the idea of separating religion 
and the state never can occur to men ex- 
cept as they cease to believe in either one 
or the other. 

From Hobbes to Rousseau the so-called 
contract theory of the state was much 
in vogue, according to which it was held 


188 FAITH IN CHRIST 


that the men of the community had origi- 
nally entered into a bargain, pledging them- 
selves to protect and help one another, 
each for the profit he was to reap from the 
compact for himself. And the notion has 
so much of: fact to build on, that each 
member of the community does derive a 
real benefit out of political union. But a 
little thought serves to make clear that 
the state does not rest on any such bargain, 
nor ever did. Men look upon their flag, 
not as the trade-mark of a going concern 
in which they have financial and other 
allied interests, but as the symbol of 
something larger than themselves, all the 
interests of which are yet their interests, 
for which it is their privilege to live and 
their honor to die. 

If it is true, as John says, that “every 
one that loveth is begotten of God,’ 
we may assume that as far as love enters any 
heart, parent’s, child’s, friend’s, patriot’s, so 
far has God entered. And this merging of 
the individual welfare in the common good 
which is the basis of all national life, what 
is it, so far as it goes, but the unity of the 
Holy Spirit in the minds of men? 

1T John 4: 7. 


GOD IN SOCIETY 189 


Well may the sight of a battered rag of 
colored bunting send the crowds mad with 
enthusiasm; mad till they can find no other 
adequate expression of their frenzy than 
to rush out, yelling and furious, into a 
tempest of carnage. For the flag reminds 
them, by the mystery of its symbolism, of 
that larger life in which they share and 
which, otherwise, they had forgotten. It 
is enough to electrify a man into deeds of 
heroism to know that he is part of a mighty 
nation of men, the interests of a multitude 
bound up with his, as he shares the experi- 
ences, joy or pain, welfare or disaster, of 
a hundred million of his kind. For con- 
sider the size to which he has sprung, 
from five feet ten to the dimensions of a 
continent ! | 

It is, of course, very silly in him to seek 
an outlet for his heroism in the slaughter of 
his fellows; there are so many better ways 
in which a man may play the hero. But, 
after all, his deeper desire is not to kill the 
other man, it is to smash the other flag. 
Every war has its stories of soldiers from 
the opposing lines hobnobbing with one 
another in the lull of battle; between man 
and man, in the beginning at least, there 


190 FAITH IN CHRIST 


is no hate. But the flags are at war, 
symbol as they are not only of union but 
of division; and division we cannot toler- 
ate. No man can ever be satisfied with 
anything less than partnership in a world- 
wide empire. To miss any South Sea 
island out of the vast dominion of our 
souls is like feeling the pinch of a tight 
shoe. Alexander lives again in every farm- 
er’s boy and factory hand. We may unite 
in peace, or we may unite in battle; one 
thing only is written in the stars: that we 
may not live apart. We must and shall 
be brothers, though we be compelled to 
seal our brotherhood in blood. And war 
will continue, despite all the eloquence 
of the pacifists, until the federation of the 
world is achieved; until the unity of the 
race finds expression in political institu- 
tions which embrace and realize the family 
of nations. 


IV 
THE KINGDOM OF GOD 


Livre minds see nothing but the ambi- 
tions of bigotry in the old Catholic endeavor 
to make the Church mistress of the earth, 
supreme in political as in domestic affairs, 
in commerce as in worship, dictator of all 
arts and sciences no less than of the creeds. 

Yet what a bold and magnificent ideal 
that endeavor represented!—nothing less 
than that the whole world should be or- 
ganized in the spirit of Christ. 

Already the world had been organized, 
under the Roman Empire, in the spirit 
of Mammon. There, before men’s eyes, 
was a vast earthly kingdom in which the 
energies of the race were requisitioned and 
harnessed in the interest of the commercial 
wealth and military glory of the few. 
Now burst upon men’s vision the hope of a 
kingdom in which the energies of the race 
were to be requisitioned and harnessed 
in the interest of the spiritual wealth and 
elory of all. Politics, commerce, literature, 


music, painting, architecture, play—all were 
191 


192 FAITH IN CHRIST 


to be made the servants of that which is 
highest in humanity. No department of 
human life, no relation between a man and 
his neighbor, was to be excepted from the 
sway of this new, beneficent tyranny of 
love and righteousness. 

We cannot wonder at the domination 
which this dream acquired over the imagi- 
nation of Christendom, and we cannot but 
admire the vastness and efficiency of the 
organization which was effected. For a 
thousand years men watched the struc- 
ture rising, filling the earth; and they saw 
it as the veritable temple of Christ; until, 
one day, Luther smote the foundations of 
it with his giant sledge and behold! rotten- 
ness. The splendid cathedral, with its 
base set in eternity, its pillars of truth 
more enduring than the hills, its spires 
lost in the very heavens, was suddenly 
reduced to a contemptible ruin; wrecked, 
not honorably by time or cannon-balls, but 
by the weakness of its own fraudulent 
workmanship. 

The Church had set out to organize the 
world in the spirit of Christ; and if she had 
been willing to lose, she might have won. 
But she chose to win, at the expense of her 


THE KINGDOM OF GOD 193 


ideal, and, becoming mistress of the world, 
she lost her own soul. At the end, grown 
rich and proud and hard, trading for her 
own gain on the religious sentiments she 
ought gladly to have died to serve, she 
retained little of Christianity except the 
name. And to-day when men talk of 
world-union they think in terms of secular 
governments, not of popes and presby- 
teries. The Church, through her own 
organization and by her own authority, 
will never again be given the opportunity 
to build that temple; she has forfeited the 
right to try. 

Little wonder that men suspect the 
Church, and berate it, and despise it. 
Nevertheless, we ought to remind our- 
selves that the Church is no mysterious, 
impersonal thing, constituted of creeds 
and candles and cathedrals; it is consti- 
tuted of men, and these not a few priests 
and preachers, but the heterogeneous mul- 
titudes. In the Middle Ages it was liter- 
ally Catholic, for it embraced the entire 
population of Europe, the only qualifica- 
tion for membership being a birth certifi- 
cate. And the men who gathered for wor- 
ship of a Sunday morning were the same 


194 FAITH IN CHRIST 


men who the day before had returned from 
battle, or driven their horses in the fields. 
No subtle change swept over them as they 
passed the sacred portals. The morals 
of the Church of Europe were the morals 
of the people of Europe, the Christianity 
of the Church was the Christianity of the 
people, and the failure of the Church was 
the failure of humanity itself. 

It was with a true insight into the secret 
of failure that the Church, at the Reforma- 
tion, turned from its dreams of empire- 
building to devote itself to the business of 
realizing the spirit of Christ in the individ- 
ual man. Luther has been accused of a 
sad lack of social sympathy in the con- 
demnation which he visited on the poor 
peasants in connection with their war 
against oppression. But it was not so 
much lack of sympathy that troubled 
Luther as a point of view; he recognized 
no “problems” other than the problems 
of the individual soul. And later Prot- 
estantism, up to within very recent years, 
has consistently maintained this point of 
view. We have been willing to preach 
temperance in the life of our church-mem- 
bers, but we have been very doubtful 


THE KINGDOM OF GOD 195 


whether a prohibition crusade was within 
the proper sphere of the Church. We have 
discussed the right of the Christian to 
take part in the slaughter of the battle- 
field, but we have been very slow to 
enter into the political field and make an 
assault on the institution of war. We have 
preached industry and thrift and neigh- 
borly kindness, by which poverty may be 
prevented or alleviated in the individual, 
but we have looked with suspicion on any 
movement aiming at such a readjustment 
of industrial conditions as might strike 
at the roots of our destructive inequalities 
of wealth. 

And we have found ample warrant for 
our individualism in the New Testament. 
What shall [ do that J may inherit eternal 
life?’? ““What must I do to be saved ?””— 
could anything be further from the purview 
of a social gospel ? 

In the Old Testament there is almost 
nothing to correspond to such questions. 
The prophets of ancient Israel were look- 
ing for a day of national deliverance; 
one is at a loss whether to characterize 
them more as preachers or as statesmen; 
from their sermons we might construct a 


196 FAITH IN CHRIST 


fairly complete history of their times. The 
kings and armies of the earth are forever 
in the foreground of their pictures. 

But through the New Testament we 
move in a different atmosphere. From 
its documents you could never construct 
a history of New Testament times. Kings 
and armies appear, but they are well in 
the background. Here we are dealing with 
men on their more essentially personal side. 
If a delegation of Assyrians had waited 
upon Isaiah, we should assume that their 
mission had something to do with the 
political relations of Assyria and _ Israel; 
but when a delegation of Greeks wished to 
see Jesus, no one for a moment imagines 
that their conversation was to have any- 
thing to do with the political relations 
of Israel and Greece. “My kingdom,” 
said Christ, “‘is not of this world.” 

There are men who would have us be- 
lieve that this individualism of the New 
Testament was not a gain but a loss. The 
charge has been freely brought against 
the old-time evangelistic preaching that 
it was rooted in a mere self-seeking, with 
each man concerned only for the interests 
of his own soul. The true Christian, it 


THE KINGDOM OF GOD 197 


has been said, will cease to occupy him- 
self with such narrow considerations; in 
a consecrated self-forgetfulness, rather, he 
will be willing to obliterate himself for 
the good of the world. 

The question at once arises, however, 
whether obliterating himself is really go- 
ing to conduce to the good of the world. 
Your reformer who fs militantly concerned 
for purity in elections, but who turns out 
to be something of a crook in his own 
business, finds his political enthusiasms dis- 
credited. Before he sets out to purify 
the community, we insist on his cleaning 
his own house. 

We do not hear of the saints of the early 
Church taking any conspicuous part in 
national affairs. It was the Pharisees, 
not the Christians, who with desperate 
heroism defended Jerusalem against the 
armies of Rome. The young Christians 
were distinguished rather by the stainless- 
ness of their lives in the midst of an evil 
world; living together in the spirit of Jesus 
and making it their supreme effort to bring 
others into the mystic circle of their fellow- 
ship. But just in this they were render- 
ing a service to the state beyond that of any 


198 FAITH IN CHRIST 


war-lord or senator. They were moulding 
the stuff out of which nations are made; 
for what is the most perfect government, 
and the best system of laws, and the most 
equitable social and industrial institutions, 
with a race of men that is degenerate? 
The first and greatest possible gift of 
Christianity to the world was the gift of 
a rejuvenated manhood. 

But this rejuvenated manhood was never 
designed to exhaust its energies in the 
wilderness, apart from the world and its 
affairs. It is inconceivable that it should 
do so. It is often argued that because 
Christ himself made no effort to control 
and readjust the political and industrial 
institutions of his day, therefore Chris- 
tianity has no concern with such institu- 
tions to the end of time. The easy infer- 
ence is debatable, but I have no mind to 
debate it. Once, long ago, I might have 
done so, but not now. I do not urge that 
Christian people should seek industrial 
and political control, any more than Christ 
sought it. I urge merely that they have 
it, as Christ did not. They have fought 
for it in the form of the ballot, they have 
slaved for it in the form of cash, they have 


THE KINGDOM OF GOD 199 


contrived and conspired for it, they have 
prayed for it, they have sacrificed their 
children and their neighbors’ children for 
it, they have on occasion broken all the 
laws of God and man for it, they have 
inherited it from fathers who died for it, 
and they have got it. And having it, 
they are responsible for the use of it. 

A man may say, of course, that while 
business and political affairs concern him 
in his capacity as merchant or as citizen, 
they do not concern him as a Christian; 
a distinction which might have been ex- 
pected to go out of fashion definitely with 
the passing of Charles I. In his private 
life Charles seems to have been an almost 
exemplary Christian gentleman, faithful 
in his domestic relations and punctilious 
in his devotions. But on the throne he 
felt himself bound by no religious scruples; 
there he was no longer Christian, but king. 
And the priests administered their last 
rites to the doomed prince on the apparent 
assumption that religion had, indeed, noth- 
ing to do with his politics, but merely with 
the manner in which he treated his wife 
and said his prayers. But the Puritans 
assumed that, on the throne or off, they 


200 FAITH IN CHRIST 


were dealing with one Charles Stuart, 
accused like any common criminal of deceit 
and murder, and declared guilty before 
God. And at the block the Puritan theory 
found a crude but convincing verification; 
there was no axe in the realm sharp enough 
to divide between the king and the man. 


The early Christians took little part in 
political affairs, it is true; but men are 
not likely to be very active politically 
when they are busy trying to save their 
heads from the political powers. And if 
they did not seek to direct events, they 
were at least not loath to condemn those 
in whose hands the direction lay. I have 
said that we find in the New Testament no 
such close connection between religion and 
the political and social movements of the 
time as in the Old; but so much connection 
we find, that the world-powers loom always 
in‘ the background, the embodiment of 
all that is selfish and evil. 

Christ himself definitely contrasted the 
spirit of his followers with the spirit in 
which the world was then governed;! 
and though Paul had a kindly word to 

1 Luke 22 : 25f. 


THE KINGDOM OF GOD 201 


say for the rulers, recognizing as he did 
the need of authority, its divine sanction, 
and the consequent obligation which rested 
on all men to obey its laws, yet even in 
Paul’s mind such a crowning wrong as the 
crucifixion was no mere incidental mis- 
carriage of justice, but deeply typical, 
revealing the heart of darkness and dis- 
order in the government of the world.’ 
When we come to the book of Revelation 
we find the imperial government depicted 
as a Wild Beast, cruel, gluttonous, lascivi- 
ous, in deliberate rebellion against the 
kingdom of God. And succeeding Chris- 
tian literature maintains this attitude of 
unrelieved condemnation for two centu- 
ries. 

Then, in the year of our Lord 323, 
occurred a startling event in the Roman 
Empire. The Church has pointed to it 
as the first stupendous world-triumph of 
the cross. Shrewd critics have seen in it 
a disaster. 

Christianity became the established, im- 
perial religion. At last the sceptre passed 
from Saul to Samuel, from David to 
Nathan, from the king who had sinned to 

1T Corinthians 2 : 8. 


202 FAITH IN CHRIST 


the prophet who had dared to denounce 
the sin. 

What a transformation the world had a 
right to expect after all the condemnation 
which Christian preachers had been hurl- 
ing at the world-rulers for three centuries ! 
And we should not be fair to disguise the 
fact that there were modifications in the 
old order. Almost at once Christianity 
on the throne decreed that the killing of a 
slave by his master was homicide, forbade 
the exposure of infants, abolished the prac- 
tice of branding convicts, and instituted 
other beneficent reforms. But there was 
no transiormation. The Christian princes 
accepted Ceesar’s crown, and with it they 
took his sword and his lust of power, and 
all the rich heritage of pagan inequalities. 

Then, after a day or two by divine reckon- 
ing, another enactment on the part of the 
Almighty. If these Christian princes turn 
pagan when they ascend the throne, the 
power shall be taken from them and in- 
trusted to the people themselves; to the 
multitudes of my Christian people, that 
they may govern the world in righteousness. 

And what accounting can we give of the 
century or more since we, in the name of 


THE KINGDOM OF GOD 203 


God and democracy, ascended the throne 
of the world’s dominion? Have we, like 
the princes, turned pagan when we were 
set in authority? Suppose that Christ 
should visit the earth to-day; that he 
should visit our jails and observe the man- 
ner in which we treat our criminals; that 
he should enter our saloons and learn 
that the state derives a considerable pro- 
portion of its revenue from such traffic in 
poverty and crime; that he should walk 
through our slums and see the suffering pov- 
erty of the multitudes in the face of the un- 
precedented luxury of the few; that he 
should find men, and women and little chil- 
dren, working long hours for something less 
than a living wage in the richest country 
God ever made; that he should find almost 
the whole world in the midst of the rav- 
ages of war—what would be—what must be 
—Christ’s verdict on a world with Chris- 
tianity on the throne? 

The answer is pitifully obvious; but, 
thank God, it 7s obvious. At every point 
our civilization is being subjected to a 
merciless criticism, with the Christian spirit 
frankly accepted as the standard of judg- 
ment. We are no longer complacent in 


204 FAITH IN CHRIST 


the face of the old wrongs. Even the 
most conservative of us cannot escape a 
vague feeling of discomfort. Never be- 
fore did war raise such a revulsion of 
horror and pity in men’s minds; nor did 
drunkenness, nor white slavery, nor poy- 
erty, nor industrial oppression. 

Is there any so blind that he cannot see 
the signs of the times? We are too good 
for the life we are living. The human 
conscience is too enlightened any longer 
to endure the codes we have inherited 
from the past. The old régime is out- 
grown. 

It is a new spirit that has taken possession 
of the mind of man; a spirit of larger fra- 
ternity, of truer justice, a fuller measure 
of the Spirit of God. And this newly 
descended Spirit acts on the material of 
human society’ just as a living seed acts 
on the material of the earth; taking that 
material and, with all the energy of the 
Eternal, organizing it into such forms as 
will give expression to the peculiar genius 
of its own life. 

In this vast, cosmic process a man may 
feel that there is little he can do. And the 
Spirit of the Age has sometimes been 


THE KINGDOM OF GOD 205 


represented in such transcendent terms 
as to make it seem as hopeless for us to 
influence its operation as to aid or impede 
the motion of the planet on which we are 
swirled through space; 


“As if good days were shapen of themselves, 
Not of the very life-blood of men’s souls.”’ * 


In human society God works through the 
work of men. The difference between the 
Europe of to-day and the Europe of the 
Dark Ages—and the dust of battle must not 
be permitted to blind our eyes to the march 
of the centuries—is due to nothing else 
than the slow accumulation of the fighting 
idealism of multitudes of obscure men and 
women, with their leaders, who revolted 
against the evils of their times. The differ- 
ence between modern America and the 
Rome of Nero’s bloody reign may be com- 
puted, foot by foot, in terms of the lives of 
heroes, mostly nameless, who refused to be 
content with a world which was at any 
point untrue to the principles of the life of 
Christ. 

So much we may accomplish, that we 
may bear our due part in the shaping of a 

1 Lowell, The Cathedral. 


206 FAITH IN CHRIST 


better to-morrow. And out of the en- 
deavor will come another, more immediate 
accomplishment; once set our hearts on 
the creation of a nobler world, and of a 
sudden we find ourselves citizens of that 
commonwealth of our dreams. All the 
evils, the wrongs, the limitations, will 
not have perished from the earth, but they 
will have fallen from our souls. Already 
we shall have found admission to that 
better country, of which poets have sung, 
the hope of which has cheered all the long, 
battle-strewn path of human history. In 
our devotion to the welfare of the brother- 
hood, we shall have found the answer to 
the cry of every awakening human spirit: 
“What must I do that J may inherit 
eternal life ?”’ 

Man’s life is in the future; what he has 
and is counts little, his character is the 
sum of his desires. Tell ys what a man 
wishes and how seriously he wishes it, 
the manner of world he is vigorously re- 
solved to create, or to have a hand in 
creating, with the number of people it 
includes and the amount of territory it 
covers—of the size of his own house-lot, 
or how much larger—and you have told 


THE KINGDOM OF GOD 207 


us about him all that the moralist cares 
to know. 3 

If his desires change, by any gradual 
process or in any lightning-flash of revela- 
tion, the man in him changes with them; 
growing into godlikeness as he achieves 
partnership in the purposes of God, par- 
taking of the divine Spirit just in so far 
as he shares the divine will. 

Therefore Christ’s first call was to faith, 
not in himself, but in the coming of the 
kingdom,! in the realization of God’s pur- 
poses for the race of men. His “gospel” 
was, that the kingdom was at hand. The 
first petition which he put into the mouths 
of his disciples was, not “Forgive us our 
debts,” but “Thy kingdom come.” And 
if this be the real prayer of any man, his 
primary and dominant motive, the thing 
he is after in life as seriously and practically 
as Napoleon was after military dominion, 
or as some of our modern millionaires 
and their emulators are after stocks and 
bonds, then for his own life already the 
kingdom is come; in his mind the Spirit 
of the Most High is enthroned. 

1Mark 1: 14 f. 


ek 
THE CROSS 


I 
THE PROBLEM OF PROVIDENCE 


MOonotHEISM is at best a drastic faith, 
scarcely less incredible than the universe 
itself. One might hesitate to accept it 
but for the still more preposterous incredi- 
bility of its alternatives. 

The unwillingness of the ancient Israel- 
ites to put away their idols was not all 
due to the bewildering vastness of the 
conception of God to which the prophets 
called them. They felt themselves living 
in the midst of a world that was in large 
part hostile, and they desired a God who 
would help them in their contest against 
the malevolent forces of nature and of 
surrounding tribes. Such a God their idol- 
worship provided them, while this all- 
sovereign God of the prophets, whose hand 
was in the famine and the flood as in the 


sunshine and the dew, who sent the dis- 
208 


THE PROBLEM OF PROVIDENCE 209 


asters and led the devastating armies of 
Damascus and Nineveh, seemed to them, 
practical people as they were, worse than 
no God at all. 

And such is the permanent, glaring di- 
lemma of monotheism. Men are forever 
finding in the universe about them an enemy 
rather than a friend, and their souls demand 
a God whose face, like their own, is set 
against the hostile forces. Monotheism 
has no such God to offer. Its premise is 
that the universe is one and friendly, that 
the smallest sparrow cannot fall unheeded, 
and that “all things work together for 
good”’ to the righteous man. 

Such, at least, is the inevitable conclu- 
sion of Christian monotheism. A man 
might conceivably think of the primal 
universal Energy as malevolent, or indiffer- 
ent, or fickle-minded; disposing its laws 
with a malicious desire to injure men, or 
having no care for human welfare, or dis- 
tributing now good and now evil in accor- 
dance with the mood of the moment. But 
it is generally assumed nowadays that there 
is in the constitution of things an all- 
dominating force of some sort which con- 
sistently “makes for righteousness,” and 


210 FAITH IN CHRIST 


in Christianity certainly we have the pic- 
ture of a God who is altogether good, 
reigning in and through the universe with 
all-embracing love. 

I confess that most of the Christians I 
have known do not more than half believe 
that God is love. Not daring openly to 
deny the doctrine, they find ready means 
of evading it. 

A woman came to my house the other 
day, for example, who refused to go out by 
the door that happened to be most con- 
venient, for the reason that it was not the 
door by which she had entered; to go out 
by any other might involve her in ‘‘bad 
luck.” This woman had been trained in 
the Christian faith and would probably 
have been shocked had I suggested a 
doubt as to the infallibility of Scripture 
or the Apostles’ Creed, but she believed 
that the destinies of her life were in some 
part controlled by a Power of such mental 
and moral idiocy that she was to be penal- 
ized for leaving a house by the wrong door. 
Of course she could not have believed 
that the God of our Bible would descend 
to such inanity; merely, the God of our 
Bible had nothing to do with the matter. 


THE PROBLEM OF PROVIDENCE 211 


He was probably busy burnishing the stars 
and prevailing on people to go to church, 
while the actual fortunes of the day were 
under the direction of monkey-brained 
fiends who do not know good from evil, but 
who keep their eyes open for folk who break 
mirrors, or spill salt, or sit down thirteen 
atatable. Such people would be indignant 
if told that they were on the same plane 
as the devil-worshippers of Ceylon, and, 
for the matter of that, they are not quite 
on the same plane; the Cingalese have 
wit enough to know what God they worship. 

Such is one way out of the dilemma of 
God’s love; the way of ancient supersti- 
tion, worshipping devils. Another is the 
way of modern science, worshipping law. 
The theory is that long ago God created 
the world and set it in motion, but that now 
it has passed out of his control. The uni- 
verse proved too strong for the hand that 
made it and pursues its ruthless way, 
crushing innocence and slaughtering babies, 
quite heedless of the benevolent being who 
started the machinery with the best of 
intentions, and who tries to compensate 
for his present helplessness by kindly sym- 
pathy. A voleanic eruption in Italy, or a 


212 FAITH IN CHRIST 


flood in China, and our hearts bleed for 
the pity of it; but we must not blame God! 
for it is the work of inexorable, irresistible, 
natural laws altogether beyond his author- 
ity. And thus we seek to save his charac- 
ter at the expense of his divinity. 

Are we then actually to believe that this 
universe, with its deaths, diseases, and 
disasters, its pestilences and wrecks and 
holocausts, its ravaging demons of war and 
drunkenness and lust and crime—are we 
to believe that this chamber of horrors of 
the world we live in was really designed 
for our benefit and is conducted outright 
for our advantage? The doctrine seems 
to verge on the fantastic. 

Voltaire’s pessimism found a ready pop- 
ular response after the earthquake and 
tidal wave at Lisbon, and still any great 
catastrophe of nature is likely to call 
forth bitter questionings of the goodness 
of God. Such reactions do honor to man’s 
sympathies, but they reflect on his in- 
sight; perhaps, even on the quickness of 
his sympathies, for there is no_ lesson 
written in the most destructive of cata- 
clysms which is not written as legibly, 
though less luridly, in every one of the little 


THE PROBLEM OF PROVIDENCE 213 


unrecorded tragedies of the home and the 
street, a hundred thousand a day, in every 
nation under heaven. 

As long as things are going well with 
us; business prosperous, a fire in the fur- 
nace, clothes on our backs, and food in 
the larder; servants to do the drudgery 
for us; the children healthy; we may 
find it comparatively easy to believe that 
this is a pretty genial sort of world, very 
creditably managed. 

But suppose we were of the company of 
the unfortunates; that we had happened 
to belong to the working classes of the 
empire in the day when the message was 
first spoken; when the working classes 
were slaves; a slave-driver’s knout our 
daily companion; our life at the mercy 
of the arrogant lordling in the castle; born 
to inequality and injustice; with no hope 
for ourselves or our children—who would 
then dare talk to us of Love on the throne? 

But, in fact, it was the slaves who be- 
lieved. The rich in their palaces went 
on with their feasting and revelling, their 
games and dances, their weaving of pretty 
odes and odd philosophies, their devising 
of new ways to spend money and new means 


214 FAITH IN CHRIST 


of killing time; and the slaves found 
God! 

Lucian’s taunt had already been Paul’s 
boast, that in the young Church of Christ 
there were “‘not many wise men after the 
flesh, not many mighty, not many noble.”’! 

Such was the miracle of the message of 
the cross. There, in the death of Christ, 
where the tragedy of human life reaches 
its utmost consummation, where at last 
sheer righteousness rides out as champion 
into the arena of the world only to be 
mocked and slain, where pessimism seems 
to find its perfect vindication; there, some- 
how, men have found triumphant solution 
of the riddle of existence, out of the supreme 
victory of evil have gathered faith that the 
world is good. 


1 T Corinthians 1 : 26. 


II 
HIS OWN INTERPRETER 


In the centre of the world for Christians 
rises the little hill of Calvary. ‘“‘We preach 
Christ crucified,”! said Paul; “I deter- 
mined not to know anything among you, 
save Jesus Christ, and him crucified.’’? 
Wherein then consist the meaning and the 
power of the cross? 

I confess that I tremble to ask the ques- 
tion: in part because an adequate answer 
would need to embrace the entire message 
of the Christian faith; and in part for the 
very reason that the message of the cross 
is “‘spiritually discerned,” that nothing 
less than inspiration can in any way fathom 
its meaning. 

Your scientist can tear a watch to pieces 
and riddle the last secret of its mechanism, 
but he cannot so readily riddle the secret 
of a flower. On the one hand, he is as 
utterly baffled as any child by the mystery 
of its life, and on the other, he has no con- 


1J Corinthians 1 : 23. 2 Idem 2 : @. 
215 


216 FAITH IN CHRIST 


cern with its beauty, without which the 
flower would not be worth studying. The 
scientist is doubtless under divine compul- 
sion to go on tearing roses to pieces, but 
any garden-lover knows how little he is 
able to interpret the language which the 
garden speaks. 


“What is there hid in the heart of a rose, 
Mother mine? 
Ah, who knows, who knows, who knows ? 
A man that died on a lonely hill 


May tell you, perhaps, but none other will, 
Little child.” ! 


We talk of Paul’s forceful logic, but when 
Paul speaks of the cross he is never the 
logician, he is evermore the poet. I doubt 
if there is a single passage in which he deals 
with the death of Christ that might not 
properly be set to music. You could not 
imagine Euclid set to music, and the com- 
poser would find little material for his 
librettos in our theologies. It is only the 
poet in us that can ever understand the 
preaching of the cross, and much more 
is it only the poet who may hope to inter- 
pret it to other men. 


‘Alfred Noyes, The Forest of Wild Thyme. 


HIS OWN INTERPRETER 217 


Such a conclusion may well make us 
modest in our preaching, but on another 
side I am not sure but it may also give 
us confidence, for we all have something 
of the poet in us. The little sunbon- 
neted countrywoman pottering over her 
flowers in the garden, would find herself 
only nonplussed and abashed by the biolo- 
gist’s jargon about functions and processes 
and Latin-named species, but if Mr. Noyes 
should happen along with a quotation or 
two from The Forest of Wild Thyme, her 
eyes would brighten with quick under- 
standing; the difference in their station 
would count for nothing in the perfection 
of their comradeship. All that the scien- 
tist could tell her, so far as she understood 
him at all, she would have to accept on 
his bare authority, but that which the poet 
says, seems to her only a happy expres- 
sion of what she herself has always been 
feeling for the words to say. 

The real message of the cross is the poet’s 
message; which any man may read, written 
on the cross itself, and which, if we miss, we 
owe our failure only to the blindness of our 
own eyes and the dulness of our own souls. 

We may place ourselves, in imagination, 


218 FAITH IN CHRIST 


at the foot of Calvary on that Friday after- 
noon. The crowds are moving about for 
the most part in silence, with here and there 
a swift whispering, and now and then a 
rude shout, which serve only to intensify 
the emotion with which the atmosphere is 
charged. Over to the left a group of women 
are sobbing out their grief, and against the 
dark sky loom three crosses from which 
there comes now no sound, of entreaty or 
of pain. On the central cross hangs the 
limp form of One of whom we had a glimpse 
in babyhood, when the halo of childish 
innocence hung over his head and the echo 
of angel songs filled all the air about the 
hut in which he was born; whom we 
saw again for an hour in boyhood, when 
he stood, erect and clear-eyed, before the 
doctors in the temple; whom in later 
life we followed out to the desert soli- 
tudes, along the highways of Israel, into 
mart and synagogue, and found always 
with the halo of childhood innocence still 
undimmed over his brow, with the light 
of boyhood frankness and vigor still un- 
clouded in his eyes, and, beyond these, a 
new sovereignty in his bearing, his gesture, 
the tones of his voice; a consciousness of 


HIS OWN INTERPRETER 219 


power mingled with a deepening passion 
of tenderness, a growing scorn of sham and 
wrong, a growing love for all beauty and 
truth, a strange sense of the reality of the 
unseen which seemed somehow to envelop 
him with a mantle of awe so that in his 
presence curiosity, and even hatred, gave 
place to reverence and fear. And now, 
at the very prime of young manhood, his 
earth-story is finished, and he hangs there 
lifeless on the cross. 

What is the meaning we read in this 
completed tragedy ? 

Of one thing I am sure; that, as specta- 
tors, we shall not feel ourselves to be in 
the presence of a commercial transaction. 
For centuries orthodox theology taught 
that it was just this. Christ having spoken 
of his death as a “‘ransom,”’ the theologians, 
carrying the logic of the word to its rigor- 
ous conclusion, declared that God had here, 
at the price of Christ’s life, bought mankind 
from Satan who, since the fall, had held 
valid property rights in the race. But 
certainly no disciple at the foot of the 
cross could have discerned in the scene 
any such grotesque meaning. 

This was the dominant theory of the 


220. FAITH IN CHRIST 


atonement for nearly a thousand years, 
from Irenzeus in the second century to 
Anselm in the eleventh, with whom another 
theory passed into the ascendant. John 
and Paul having spoken of Christ as a 
“propitiation,’ the theologians proceeded 
to carry the logic of this word to its con- 
clusion. The theory has had many vari- 
ations, but in its most popular modern 
form? it is briefly this: that the immutable 
divine statutes having been transgressed, it 
was necessary that some one should be 
punished, and so, to satisfy the inexorable 
justice of God, the penalty of the offenses 
of the race was meted out on Christ. 

The theory is sadly lacking in Scriptural 
warrant. Five centuries before Christ an 
approved prophet of the Almighty had 
declared: “If the wicked turn from all 
the sins that he hath committed . . . he 
shall surely live, he shall not die. None of 
his transgressions that he hath committed 
shall be remembered against him.’* And 
Moses surely had no thought that he was 
reflecting on the divine justice when he 
cried: ‘‘Jehovah, Jehovah, a God merci- 


1 Stevens, The Christian Doctrine of Salvation, p. 138. 
2 Thid., 154 f. 3 Ezekiel 18 ;: 21 f. 


HIS OWN INTERPRETER 92] 


ful and gracious, slow to anger and abun- 
dant in loving-kindness and truth, keeping 
loving-kindness for thousands, forgiving 
iniquity and transgression and sin.’’* 

These sophistical theories and others 
like them have this in common, that they 
are all foisted on the cross from without. 
No ingenuous mind in the presence of that 
tragedy could ever have read into it any 
such meaning. Some one would have to 
tell us what the cross meant, and we should 
have to accept its meaning on the sheer 
authority of our instructor. Christ was 
called the Logos, the Word, the supreme 
message of God to the world; but we 
should have to believe that in this, the 
culminating event of his life, the message 
was so concealed that no one could find 
it without an interpreter ! 

Is there any message which the cross 
brings to us directly, written not in the 
volumes which tell us about it, but on the 
cross itself? Certain meanings, at least, 
we may read in it on which all men agree 
to whom the cross means anything what- 
ever. 

1 Exodus 34 : 6 f. 


Il 
THE REVELATION OF THE CROSS 


In the presence of the cross we wake 
up for one thing to a sense of the dignity 
of human life, the value of a human soul. 

In some measure death always teaches 
this lesson. The sight of a man killed, 
any man, thrills us with a shock of unutter- 
able catastrophe. He may have been a 
very useless, insignificant sort of person; 
had we seen him alive we might, perhaps, 
have passed him without notice. But now 
we notice him; our hearts stop beating. 
A man is killed! and it is astonishing how 
little difference it makes, for the moment 
at least, what his station or quality. It 
seems In the lightning-flash of that revela- 
tion that he was not so insignificant after 
all. For the instant we are aware that, by 
virtue of his very humanity, man is partner 
in the infinite. 

Gethsemane is our evidence of the ful- 
ness with which Christ recognized the 
awlulness of the tragedy which he faced; 


a tragedy in which, as he forecasted, his 
222 


THE REVELATION OF THE CROSS 223 


followers were to share through genera- 
tions. That he chose to persevere, rather 
than to withdraw to the safety of his bench 
in Nazareth, meant that he believed, not 
that life is cheap, but, on the contrary, that 
in life there is something of such tran- 
scendent value as to be worth dying for. 
Men ask, regarding war, What is there, 
and what can there be, that is worth its 
awiul cost in wealth and suffering? In 
Christ’s resolute tread before the Phari- 
sees and the Roman governor, we read his 
conviction that life’s values are worth all 
the sweat of enduring toil, all the blood 
of unflinching sacrifice. And as we look 
at him a voice within, deeper than studied 
reason, tells us that his conviction is true. 
In the presence of the cross, again, we 
waken to a knowledge of where the true 
values in life lie. This message likewise 
is brought to us, more or less clearly, in 
every experience we have with death. 
When we gather for the last rites of our 
friend that has gone, we judge him by 
somewhat different standards from those 
we have been used to. Wealth, and repu- 
tation, and achievement lose something of 
their customary glamour; it is of other 


224 FAITH IN CHRIST 


things in our friend’s life that we are likely 
to think first. At the cross the revelation 
becomes absolute; utter poverty, utter 
disrepute, utter failure, but they all become 
merely a background against the darkness 
of which gleams more brilliantly the tri- 
umph of his life. 

Your prosperous farmer whose soul never 
scales the fences by which his land is 
bounded, no longer seems _ prosperous. 
Your big man who controls a railroad, 
but whose soul is as definitely bounded 
by the fences which run on either side of 
his iron tracks, no longer seems big. You 
see them both poor and petty as the mice 
that infest their barns and sheds. 

Christ’s soul was as wide as the uni- 
verse, as deep as the heart of God; he 
owned the earth, and all heaven besides. 
A little garden there was on the slopes of 
Olivet where he “‘ofttimes resorted”? with 
his disciples, and can we doubt that his 
ownership of it was more valid than that 
of the man who happened to hold the title- 
deeds? Like a poor artist in the presence 
of a masterpiece, he had no rights in it 
that he could sell, but he had other rights 
that he would not sell, at any price you 


THE REVELATION OF THE CROSS 225 


could name. So in the markets of the 
Almighty he had bought his rights, which 
no man could take from him, in every 
flower and tree and brook between Galilee 
and Jerusalem, in all the valleys and the 
hills, the country highroads, and the city 
streets. He was miserably used by his 
fellows, but he was the one man of all time 
who enjoyed the full measure of human 
friendship; for he saw and served the best 
in men, that divine best which no other 
man had ever discerned, which they had 
not suspected in themselves. 

In all things the measure of his love 
became the measure of his life, and losing 
all, he yet gained more. 

At the cross, then, we know, first, either 
that Christ was a fool, or—the lesson of 
Shakespeare’s tragedies and Rembrandt’s 
portraits—that man is not a mere bubble 
on the sea of existence, but a soul; with 
tremendous issues involved in his life, with 
destinies of infinite import. And this con- 
clusion, behold, sweeps out into wider 
conclusions; for to invest human life with 
meaning and purpose is to. invest the 
universe with meaning and purpose—with 


God. 


226 FAITH IN CHRIST 


At the cross also we know that Christ 
died the poorest and most bereft waif of 
misfortune that ever lived, or that the 
wealth of humanity is not in material pos- 
sessions and worldly power, but in the 
treasures of the soul itself. And if, with 
mysterious authority, our instincts insist 
that Christ did not miss the way but found 
it, that it is love alone that unlocks for a 
man the treasures of the universe, then 
is it not only the heart of man that has 
given up its secret, the heart of the universe 
has given up its secret as well. For our 
interpretation of human life is, and of 
necessity must be, our definition of God. 
He who believes that might makes right 
worships a god of mere dumb energy, and 
his real cathedral is the armory or the 
battleship. He who believes in the su- 
preme value of money thereby confesses 
his conviction that the literally real ruler 
of this world is Mammon, and his cathedral 
is a Woolworth Building. As, at the cross, 
we realize love to be the conquering law 
of the human spirit, we waken also to the 
sublime knowledge that God is love. 

Here surely is the last and most amaz- 
ing of paradoxes, that God’s love should 


THE REVELATION OF THE CROSS) 227 


seem to shine in the midst of all the injus- 
tice and the pain. But the paradox is 
a familiar experience with most men who 
have suffered. It is rather in the hour of 
grief than in the hour of joy that we have 
been most ineffably conscious of the divine 
presence. To any who have pondered 
- on the ways of God with man it will not 
seem strange that the supreme revelation 
of his love should come through the death 
of his first-born. 

At Calvary the life of Christ reached 
its crisis, and not the life of Christ only, 
but the life of the disciples, and the life 
of the race. In its presence we dare no 
longer equivocate; the issue is plain and 
we must decide. Which are we to take: 
the God of Cxesar—of Caiaphas and Pilate 
and Judas—or the God of Christ? The 
evidence may not be so compelling but 
that we have our choice, but so much we 
may understand, that this is the only 
choice we have. 


IV 
LIGHT FROM THE WILDERNESS 


Tuer message of Christ’s death is but a 
flashing epitome of the message of all his 
life. At his tomb one is shocked by no 
slightest sense of incongruity with the 
manner of his living. The voice that speaks 
from Calvary is changed not even in tone 
from the voice that spake in the upper room, 
in the synagogue of Nazareth, by Gennes- 
aret. In word and deed, in life and death, 
his message to the world is one unbroken 
harmony. | 

At the very threshold of his ministry he 
deliberately faced for himself the primary 
problems of life. For forty days he wrestled 
with them, fasting and in solitude, and the 
answers to which he fought his way reveal 
how consciously he took his stand on those 
principles which the world has since learned 
to read in his crucifixion. 

The cross has no other commentary equal 
to Christ’s own account of the temptation 
scene; for the account must come from his 


lips. But even the temptations do not 
228 


LIGHT FROM THE WILDERNESS 229 


give up their secret to the thoughtless. 
First of all, if we are to understand them, 
we must free our minds from all haze of 
magic and miracle and get out into the 
sunlight of our common workaday world. 

We talk of the thirty years of silence in 
Christ’s life, but in reality we have a very 
considerable knowledge of those early years. 
Compressed into a sentence or two we have 
the picture of a sunny, obedient, grow- 
ing childhood that had no possible place 
for the wonder-tales with which later gen- 
erations tried to decorate it. The sur- 
prise with which his old neighbors received 
. the report of the strange events of his 
ministry is evidence enough that there 
was nothing in his boyhood and young 
manhood which apparently set him apart 
from the companions with whom he played 
and worked and worshipped. 

And in his own mind, during this time, 
what was the course of events? Through 
it all did he hide a secret, suspected by none 
other, betrayed by no look or word that 
escaped him even in the household, but 
quite clear always to himself; the distinct 
memory of a former life that he had lived 
above the earth and that forever dis- 


230 FAITH IN CHRIST 


tinguished him from other men? We have 
no hint certainly that the natural course 
of his boyhood was convulsed by any such 
tremendous fact even in his own conscious- 
ness. 

If there is any one thing on which the 
gospels agree, on which he himself insisted 
and his followers after him through all the 
centuries, it is that, whatever his eternal 
relation with God, he was yet a man; with 
a human body not only, but with a human 
mind, with the ordinary experiences and 
the common consciousness of humanity. A 
natural, human life the young carpenter 
lived in Nazareth, a life of simple fellow- 
ship with his village neighbors and of 
unbroken communion with his heavenly 
Father. 

At last, however, rumor comes to him 
of John’s preaching, and after how long 
contemplation we know not, he goes down 
by the stream to identify himself with the 
work of the new prophet. As he stands 
by the water the confidence is confirmed 
in his mind that he is God’s chosen instru- 
ment for the establishment of a _ new, 
divine kingdom in the world. “Thou art 
my beloved Son,”’ he hears the words, and 


LIGHT FROM THE WILDERNESS 231 


their meaning is that the quiet, simple life 
of Nazareth belongs to the past. 

Where, then, is he to go now? what is he 
to do? He starts off, homeward, perhaps, 
but he turns aside into the wilderness. He 
must think. All the problems of life stare 
at him, demanding solution. So many 
voices speak within him; to which of them 
is he to listen? 

Of the three specific temptations into 
which he divides the contest, two of them 
at first glance scarcely seem to us tempta- 
tions at all. That he should turn stones 
into bread to satisfy his hunger; where were 
the evil of such an act, were the act possible ? 
And that he should leap from the temple- 
top; what reasonable incentive could he 
have for such an aberration? Why should 
it require any peculiar strength of soul to 
resist so frivolous a suggestion ? 

Even the remaining temptation could 
not have been real for Christ if the familiar 
Docetic idea of him were true. What to 
him would have been the promise of the 
cheap glories of this world if the memory 
had been fresh in his mind of a reign with 
the Almighty in which he held sway over 
a million swinging worlds! How ludicrous 


232 FAITH IN CHRIST 


must have seemed Satan’s suggestion of 
homage if they had both known as they 
spoke that, a few brief millenniums before, 
Christ had created that poor, deformed, 
fallen spirit and that he could now, if he 
chose, snuff him out with a word! 

The temptations must remain dark to 
us except as we remember that Christ 
was “in all points tempted like as we are, 
yet without sin.’”! 

“If thou be the son of God,” came the 
suggestion, ““command that these stones 
be made bread.” Use your power, that 
is, for the satisfaction of your animal appe- 
tites. And there is no man who does not, 
soon or late, hear that voice. A few 
brief years we have here on earth to live; 
to make a bare living is hard enough; 
thousands there are and thousands of 
thousands who lack even so much. If we 
are better off, have strength enough of 
hand and brain to provide for ourselves 
and our families the common physical 
necessities, why should we not, literally, 
“therewith be content’? What need for 
further striving; why the unrest, the troub- 
ling ambitions and aspirations? Find bread 

1 Hebrews 4: 15. 


LIGHT FROM THE WILDERNESS 233 


to feed your body and be thankful. Said 
Christ: “‘Man shall not live by bread 
alone.” 

At the outset he recognized that man is 
of too noble a birth to be put off with mere 
physical satisfactions; that he is inveter- 
ately superior to the ox. So he began 
with the assertion of the dignity of human 
life, of the infinite values wrapped up in a 
human soul. 

Then came the suggestion, here is a 
prize more worthy of a man: ‘The king- 
doms of this world and the glory of them”’; 
honor, power, reputation, achievement, 
wealth. It is all yours for the asking. 
You have merely to conform to the rules 
of the great game; you have merely to be 
aggressive, selfish, unscrupulous, unpitying, 
shrewd, efficient, and you will gain all that 
earth has to offer. Men will look at you 
and know you for one of the victors, honor- 
ing your abilities, respecting your opinions, 
and envying your success. For this you 
have only to set.a proper value on the 
things of earth and make them first in your 
thinking; honor them, reverence them, wor- 
ship them. And Christ said: “Thou shalt 
worship the Lord thy God, and him only 


234 FAITH IN CHRIST 


shalt thou serve.” It was his recognition 
of where the true values in life le. 

And not yet was the devil finished with 
him. Another shaft he had in his quiver, 
which gathered to itself all the force of 
the other two, all the power of evil in the 
world, to be hurled at the very heart of 
all that is good. 

Christ had chosen to stake his life on 
the reality of the unseen, the spiritual; 
in both the former temptations he had 
appealed from earth to heaven, from the 
world to God. Said the tempter, There 
is no God! 

What compelling evidence is there that 
this consciousness of a divine mission is 
not the fabric of your own dreams? Be- 
fore you hazard too far, let us make 
sure; let us institute a little experiment. 
Through the book of his word he has prom- 
ised that he will give his angels charge 
over you to keep you from hurt or harm; 
then cast yourself down from the pinnacle 
of the temple and prove it, whether there 
be anything in these promises of God or 
not; put him to the test. And Christ 
answered: “‘Thou shalt not test the Lord 
thy God.” It was the whole-hearted ven- 


LIGHT FROM THE WILDERNESS 235 


ture of his vente in the reality of a loving 
God. 

If this temptation did not come to Christ 
as a trial of faith, then not only was his 
reply to the tempter pointless, but—far 
from being in all points tempted like as 
we are—he was spared the supreme chal- 
lenge of every other human life. And 
there is, of course, nothing stranger In the 
thought of his being tempted to doubt God 
than in the thought, for example, that, be- 
ing God, he was tempted to worship Satan. 

The form in which the temptation came 
to him was no accident. He was to cast 
himself down from the top of the temple; 
if there was a kindly Hand to protect him, 
he would be saved from harm; if not, he 
would be dashed to death at the base of 
the wall. And welcome death in such 
circumstances! If this world of the tang!- 
ble and the ponderable, with its pleasures 
and treasures that delight for a day and then 
pall; if this be all there is of the life of 
man, then would fate be kind to ring down 
the curtain on the poor, make-believe little 
show. Only faith in God, and in his seri- 
ous purposes for the children of men, can 
save all human life from mockery. 


236 FAITH IN CHRIST 


So Christ met the Three Temptations, 
the three temptations which assail the soul 
of every man, and in which all temptations 
are comprehended; the temptation to the 
life of the animal, the temptation to the life 
of the conqueror, and the temptation to 
despair. 

Having determined the principles on 
which his own life was to be built, he had 
determined them also for his kingdom. — 
It was to be no kingdom of mere material 
satisfactions, nor of worldly glory and 
military might. It was to be that king- 
dom of millennial goodness at which men 
smiled then as they smile to-day; vision- 
ary, Utopian, impossible, but, as God is 
God, zt was to be. 


V 
THE FIRST COMMANDMENT 


Curist’s answer to all the problems of 
life was—God! The arms of the cross 
reached outward toward men, but its cen- 
tral shaft pointed upward. This is the 
first commandment of all, he had said, 
Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all 
thy heart. 

A shallow altruism preaches that our 
attitude toward our neighbor is the im- 
portant thing, and that if we unselfishly 
serve him, our relation with God need not 
concern us. The conspicuous fallacy in 
such counsel is, that our relation with God 
determines, absolutely, the service we ren- 
der our neighbor. 

Here is a father, for example, with an 
altogether devoted affection for his son, 
but whose affection prompts him, as was 
charged against Spartan parents, to in- 
struct the boy in the art of stealing; or, 
in more modern fashion, to teach him that 


the chief end of man is the accumulation 
237 


238 FAITH IN CHRIST 


of wealth. Here is a mother who, con- 
sciously or unconsciously, trains her girl 
in snobbery or indolence or the cheap am- 
bitions of a frivolous society. It is not 
love for the child that is lacking, but the 
love of a child, or of a man or woman, 
supplies no least direction to the service 
it impels. The trouble is with the parent’s 
philosophy of life. 

And our philosophy of life, according to 
_ Christian conceptions, is but one phase of 
our religion. If God were nothing more 
than he appears to many a childish imagina- 
tion, a vast Being seated above the clouds, 
reaching down now and then to intervene 
miraculously in the events of earth and 
receiving us, or refusing to receive us, when 
we pass from this world to the next, while 
it would, of course, be very advantageous 
to gain his favor, our relation with him, 
our religion, would be only an incident in 
our lives; parallel with, however much 
more important than, our relations with 
our children and our business associates 
and flowers and books. But if God is the 
Soul of the universe, the basis of all being 
and the source of all energy, who “him- 
self giveth to all life, and breath, and all 


THE FIRST COMMANDMENT 239 


things,” ! then our relation to him be- 
comes our relation to the universe, and our 
religion embraces our whole outlook on life, 
the totality of all that life means to us. 

Religion is then no longer merely one 
of the various departments of human life, 
its name to be carved at the head of its 
appropriate column on our public buildings 
along with that of art and science and 
commerce; it is the hidden spring of all 
human activity. It can have no more to 
do with churches than with schools and 
banks and factories and kitchens, for it 
has everything to do with them all. 

The religion of Christ is based on the 
tremendous declaration that God is love. 
With such a God there can be but one possi- 
ble relation, the relation of love. And to 
love him means delight in all that is divine 
in the universe, in everything through which 
his life finds expression. ‘“‘No man hath 
seen God at any time,”’? says John, but— 
such is the conclusion of the argument— 
because his Spirit dwells in his children, 
therefore, we love him in our love of them. 
“Tf a man say, I love God, and hateth his 
brother, he is a liar.” 

1 Acts 17 : 25. 27 John 4: 12. 


240 FAITH IN CHRIST 


And God’s expression of himself is far 
from exhausted in the souls of men. There 
is a suggestion of truth, but scarcely more 
than a suggestion, in Oppenheim’s contrast 
between the revelation of the wayside and 
that of the street: 


“We builders of cities and civilizations walled away 
from the sea and the sod 

Must reach, dream-led, for our revelations through 
one another—as far as God.’’! 


Not even in the midst of the Enchanted 
People can we afford to be blind to the 
revelation of sea and sod. To miss the 
appeal of the changing heavens, whether 
over the sea or over the city; to pass the 
lilies unnoticed, in the meadow or in the 
florist’s window, is still and always to 
fail in appreciation of God’s glory. Chris- 
tianity thus opens the door to the widest 
culture, for it invites interest in all that 
is true, honorable, just, pure, lovely, gra- 
cious; in all that is really interesting in the 
world. 

Christ did not preach an utterly selfless 
altruism, as if a man should despise any 
enrichment of his own life. ‘Thou shalt 

' Saturday Night. 


THE FIRST COMMANDMENT 241 


love thy neighbor,” he said, “as thyself.” 
Our love of self is not a primary passion, 
it is the product of our love of other 
things, with no meaning except as we value _ 
and desire something outside ourselves; he 
who had no interests in life would have no 
interest in living. And the more we love 
God, the wider and deeper our interests 
become. 

Not the renunciation of personality, but 
its fulfilment, was Christ’s ideal; “I came 
that they may have life, and may have it 
abundantly.” The monastery, the one 
great ascetic institution of the Church, not 
only owes its origin to the East, but on 
Christian soil it has always tended to lose 
its ascetic character, becoming at its prime 
the very treasury of all the arts of civil- 
ization. 

The value we set on things for ourselves 
is, generally, our only criterion of their 
value for others, and the Christian ideal 
contemplates a generous and brotherly so- 
ciety, in which none is enriched at an- 
other’s expense, and none impoverished that 
another may abound; though when the 
choice arises between another’s welfare and 
our own, we choose his—the mother her 


Q42 FAITH IN CHRIST 


child’s, the true neighbor his friend’s— 
not because we love our neighbor more 
than ourselves, but because we love our 
neighbor more than dollars, or comfort, 
or any other thing on which we have set 
our hearts. In the pure love of God the 
immemorial conflict between love of self 
and love of others is dissolved. 

Self-culture, indeed, is so far from being 
opposed to self-sacrifice that it alone quali- 
fies us as useful servants. No man will 
choose you as companion for a visit to the 
picture-gallery for the mere reason that 
you love him; you must love the pictures. 
The affection of a person who is never so 
happy as when he is serving us, but who 
has no interest in any of the things that 
interest us, may be more of a burden than 
of a delight; a bore is not redeemed by 
devotion. 

We cannot serve men out of an empty 
head any more than out of an empty purse. 
We cannot introduce our children to the 
pleasures of Shakespeare until we our- 
selves have felt the thrill of his magic. 
What the world requires of us is not a 
dreary ministry in which we dole out crumbs 
of conscientious helpfulness, it asks to 


THE FIRST COMMANDMENT 243 


share with us our own delight in life. “‘ My 
joy,’”’ said Christ, “I give unto you.” 
Christian culture, however, and with 
it Christian ministry, transcend material 
goods and all arts and sciences, as we know 
God transcends the things of sense through 
which we find him revealed. If it has 
sometimes been misdirected, it has not 
been essentially untrue to its genius, in 
denouncing luxury and burning vanities, 
stopping plays and quarrelling with scien- 
tists and otherwise treating lightly the 
products of the workshop, whether of art, 
of scholarship, or of commerce. Men gen- 
erally agree that a nation honors itself 
when, for the salvation of its soul, 1t sacri- 
fices the most beautiful of cathedrals rather 
than yield to a foreign army; and a foreign 
army is only one, very gross, and not par- 
ticularly effective instrument for the de- 
struction of souls. Art, grown vain or 
frivolous, and learning, grown blind to 
the softer lights, have alike been known 
more than once to lead men into idolatry, 
while commerce has been recognized as 
friendly, even by the most pagan culture, 
only when reduced to rigorous subjection. 
The love of God demands glad surrender 


244 FAITH IN CHRIST 


of any of the things that are seen, and 
temporal, in defense of principles, which 
are unseen arid eternal. Always, indeed, 
it offers us a cross to be borne, on which 
the lower desires may be crucified, that 
the higher aims may be fulfilled. | 

And Christian culture goes further still. 
Behind all the phenomena of earth we 
believe that a mysterious heart beats, 
a mysterious voice whispers, that we stand 
forever in the face of an infinite Spirit that 
yearns, not for reverence only, but for 
companionship, admitting us to the secret 
chamber of his holy, immediate presence, 
in prayer. 

And we can never think our service of any 
other man complete until we have led him 
into this inner sanctuary. Not that we 
are tempted to forget even his crudest 
physical necessities; it has never been the 
most spiritual man who has been readiest 
when his brother asked for a fish to give 
him a sermon. But we remember that we 
found our own admission into the king- 
dom, not through any form of material 
prosperity, but through that new outlook 
on life which is known as faith in Christ, 
and which finds its consummation in per- 


THE FIRST COMMANDMENT Q45 


sonal fellowship with God; that so, while 
others were paying their lives for cap 
and bells, we have got heaven for the 
asking. And our deepest desire for every 
other man must be that he share with us 
in this life-giving experience. 


VI 
THE LOVE OF GOD 


Tue formula of the two great command- 
ments was not new with Christ. He found 
it in Deuteronomy, and all the Old Testa- 
ment is its commentary. But in him for 
the first time the world saw it illustrated, 
interpreted, in a personality; therefore 
in him for the first time the world learned 
its meaning, for life is of too complicated 
a nature to be intelligibly expressed in any 
other terms than those of life itself. 

The life of Christ is the law of our life, 
and it is—law; law not in the old, Mosaic, 
autocratic sense of a decree issued from 
without, which Paul insisted had no place 
under the Christian order, but in the new, 
scientific sense of a principle working within; 
woven into the constitution of the spiritual — 
universe as inextricably as the laws of 
gravitation and the conservation of energy 
are woven into the universe of matter. 


Thrust your hand into the furnace and 
246 


THE LOVE OF GOD 247 


the hand is burned; such is the law of 
fire, it is the way fire works. Violate the 
principles of Christ in your living and 
the soul is destroyed; such is the law of 
sin, 1t is the way sin works. And these 
laws there is no breaking; you may at 
most defy them and be broken. } 
Withdraw your hand from the furnace, 
however, and the burning ceases, the won- 
derful process of healing begins. Modern 
science has disclosed nothing more amaz- 
ing than the devices which God has con- 
trived through nature to cure the wounds 
of disease and accident. Cut your finger, 
and at once a host of little soldiers is 
mustered to repair the breach, with a per- 
fection of swift mobilization beyond that 
of the most efficient of modern governments. 
And he has made like provision for the 
cure of souls. “‘Unto you that fear my 
name shall the sun of righteousness arise 
with healing in his wings.”' From Moses 
to Malachi the message of the prophets 
is forgiveness on the ground of penitence. 
But there can be no forgiveness on any 
other ground. For God to make excep- 
tion, to rule that in any case sin should 
1 Malachi 4 : 2. 


248 FAITH IN CHRIST 


not destroy, would be an abrogation of 
law in which the worlds would fly into a 
chaos madder than if the bonds of gravity 
should relax their grasp among the atoms 
and the stars. 

We are accustomed to accounts of Cal- 
vary which imply a conflict in the mind of 
God; his justice demanding that men be 
punished, his love seeking a way to save. 
If we were to imagine a conflict in God’s 
mind it would be as sensible, more sensible, 
to think of his love demanding punishment 
—that by the pain of it men might be 
recalled from their sin; and his justice 
intervening—because they are so childish 
and predisposed to evil. And even this, 
as I hope the reader will insist, is not alto- 
gether sensible. 

In fact there is, and can be, no such 
conflict. The love revealed in the cross 
is no mere amiable sentiment by which 
the strict demands of justice are modified. 
It is as far as possible from the indulgent 
mood in which moral offenses are over- 
looked, and it is further still, 7f possible, 
from the opiate philosophy of those who 
humor their indolence and dull the saving 
pain of their sympathies by denying the 


THE LOVE OF GOD 249 


reality of ugliness and wrong. It is the 
love that issues in righteousness and sacri- 
fice, an unsparing and ruthless love, too 
intense to count the cost of redemption. 

The polytheist was not all wrong; the 
tide of the world is indeed against us, and 
life confronts us as a battle to be fought. 
But because we believe God is with us in 
the conflict, therefore our response to the 
ills of life is not resignation, but resistance. 
And, more than this, we believe that God 
is back of the conflict itself, that the whole 
baffling scheme of things is designed for 
our good; not, it is true, to minister to 
our comfort and ease, but to aid in the long, 
hard process of suppressing the brute in 
us and liberating the divine. 

For, after all, what is our indictment 
against the world-order but that we our- 
selves are involved in it? Our bodies are 
of a piece with the vast machine of the 
swinging suns, with its incomprehensible, 
lightning-flashing, thunder-cracking ener- 
gies of electricity and fire and gravity, and 
who knows what besides! And sometimes, 
by our folly or our thoughtlessness or 
through no fault of our own, we slip into 
the path of a passing bolt or find ourselves 


250 FAITH IN CHRIST 


caught in the cogs. But, terrible as is 
the risk, awful as is the tragedy when it 
comes, who would forego the power that 
comes from our partnership in the cosmos; 
the power of laying hold on nature’s ener- 
gies and harnessing them for the purposes 
of our own choosing? Who, even, would 
miss the thrill of the daily adventure with 
death ? 

And we are of a piece as well with the 
still more marvellous mechanism of human 
society, with its spiritual energies and 
catastrophes, in comparison with which the 
most volcanic convulsions of the physical 
are but the crackling of thorns under a pot. 
Adam sinned, and I pay the penalty. 
Heredity curses me with the follies of a 
thousand generations. One man turns 
drunkard, and: no one knows how many 
_ Innocents reap the harvest of his bestiality. 
One nation goes mad with ambition, and 
the whole world is drenched in blood. 
But where is the man who would live iso- 
lated from the sweeping currents of our 
common life! Because we share the heri- 
tage of the world’s wrongs, therefore, also, 
we share the heritage of its heroisms and 
devotions. Never a patriot achieved the 


THE LOVE OF GOD 251 


emancipation of hill-tribe or nation, never 
scientist discovered a new law, nor inven- 
tor contrived a new device, nor pioneer 
opened the way to a new country; never 
poet framed a song, nor prophet thrilled 
men with a word of truth, nor workman 
accomplished an honest day’s work, but 
we are richer for his labor. And _ the 
liberator whose cry was unheard, the scien- 
tist for whom the secret did not unfold, the 
explorer, poet, prophet, workman, who 
tried and failed, but still tried—the Dreamer 
who would found a new, strange kingdom 
over the earth, in which the child should 
lead and the strong should serve, and who 
came to the end of his labors to find a 
handful of weeping women as his subjects, 
his treasure a crown of thorns and the 
nails that pierced his feet and hands; 
he also has made his contribution to our 
heritage, not so much indirectly through the 
work that he did, but directly, as if the 
very man that he was had become a magic, 
transforming fluid to be poured into the 
crucible in which the Lord God keeps the 
material of human souls. 

Our buffetings by fate and circumstance 
are the price we pay for our divinity, our 


252 FAITH IN CHRIST 


participation in God, our partnership in 
the universal life. The world is one, 


“One God, one law, one element”’; 


if we violate the law, we cut ourselves off 
from the Source of life, and the pain of 
our dying thrills through the universe 
to its very centre in the heart of God 
himself. If we obey, we save our own life 
not only, but with every least victory over 
the evil in us, with every baffled effort to 
further a good work in the world, we hasten 
the coming of the kingdom, that 


“one far-off divine event 
To which the whole creation moves.” 


vil 
EASTER 


In the cross the disciples saw the supreme 
vindication of the love of God; but they 
did not see this at once. On the contrary, 
their first view of Calvary revealed only 
the tragedy and the failure. They looked 
on it as men might look on the ruins of a 
vast temple that was to have crowned the 
earth. ‘We hoped that it was he who 
should redeem Israel,’”! but the hopes 
were of the past. 

And then, suddenly, their darkness scat- 
tered. Something broke upon the night 
of their despair and they awoke to find 
themselves possessed of a passion of en- 
thusiasm that sent them out over the earth 
carrying a message of hope which was to 
kindle the heart of mankind into song. 
They themselves said that Christ had 
risen from the dead, that they had seen 
him and held converse with him, back from 
the grave. We cannot, of course, prove 
that this was not a baseless delusion; it 


1 Luke 24 : 21. 
253 


254 FAITH IN CHRIST 


is all safely beyond the domain of demon- 
stration, though scepticism has yet to ex- 
plain whence came to these disheartened 
men the sudden conviction of so tremen- 
dous an event as the resurrection. But at 
least they believed that he had returned, 
and how their faith flooded the darkened 
world with light! Dead with Christ, par- 
takers so far as they followed him in all the 
losses he endured, they were also risen with 
him, the partners in his abiding gain. 
Immortality! there was the inner secret 
of life’s mystery. And it needs immor- 
tality to riddle the mystery. For, however 
far we may get with our arts and sciences 
and social organizations, if we are to believe 
that the end of all the achievements of 
earth is to be moon-plane barrenness, until 
the trump of some stellar cataclysm shall 
waken the cold frame into a resurrection of 
fire so that the long struggle may begin 
again, then can we not escape the feeling 
that the whole race of men is not worth 
serving, its triumphs a pretense. All the 
labor and the contest and the heroic en- 
deavor, and at last nothing to show for 
the work of a world’s ages-long lifetime! 
We mortals draw back shuddering from 


EASTER 255 


such a conclusion; for us if any value is 
to be real, it must be somehow permanent. 
‘Weary waiting and weary striving, 


Glad outsetting and sad arriving; 
What is it worth when the goal is won?” 


In the light of Easter morning the mean- 
ing of the cross becomes clear, and the 
meaning of the whole life from Bethlehem 
to Calvary; the meaning of death and 
suffering and defeat, and of all life from 
star-dust to star-dust again. The life and 
the death and the resurrection all speak 
the same language. If the lesson of the 
empty tomb is a delusion, if immortality is 
a false hope, the world is insane; no other- 
wise may we hope to justify our sense of 
the dignity of human life, of the suprem- 
acy of the spiritual, of the love of God. 
But far within me I recognize the lan- 
guage of Christ’s life as the half-forgotten 
speech of my own soul, and I take the 
words on an authority beyond that of our 
poor, human evidences, as a message from 
home. 

And behold, a voice out of the cloud, saying, This 


is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased; HEAR 
YE HIM. 


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